


What We've Got

by blackeyedblonde



Series: -What We've Got- Verse [1]
Category: True Detective
Genre: Comfort Reading, Developing Relationship, Domestic Bliss, Emotional Sex, Falling In Love, Fluff, Light Angst, M/M, Old Married Couple, Post-Series, Romance, Slice of Life, otherwise known as a long romp through Redneck Candyland
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2016-12-13
Packaged: 2018-01-16 16:11:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 36
Words: 280,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1353625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde/pseuds/blackeyedblonde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first night Marty gets Rust home and put to bed he whimpers like an old hound dog in his sleep, making these ripped-raw noises that well and gurgle up past his lips like fresh blood from the hole in his gut all over again. Doesn’t know he’s doing it, course not, but Marty lays there next to him in the dark—the man’s only got one bed, ain’t no shame in that—and has to wonder about the Vietnam-grade shit Rust’s got playing in living technicolor in his head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. something convenient

**Author's Note:**

> 3/23/14: A couple days ago I was still firmly planted in the frame of mind that I wouldn't ever be writing fic for this show...and then this happened. I've admittedly had some trouble trying to get an authentic portrayal of these boys down on paper, so bear with me as I explore and test the waters; it's a definite work in progress. 
> 
> I've also garnered a lot of amazing inspiration from the fan community at large over the past few weeks, so this is dedicated to y'all.

The first night Marty gets Rust home and put to bed he whimpers like an old hound dog in his sleep, making these ripped-raw noises that well and gurgle up past his lips like fresh blood from the hole in his gut all over again. Doesn’t know he’s doing it, course not, but Marty lays there next to him in the dark—the man’s only got one bed, ain’t no shame in that—and has to wonder about the Vietnam-grade shit Rust’s got playing in living technicolor in his head.

He doesn’t say anything about it in the morning when he wakes up and Rust has his whiskery face jammed up in the junction between his neck and shoulder, drooling a sour spot on the soft cotton of his t-shirt. Doesn’t ask when Rust blinks awake and mumbles something about needing to take a fuckin’ piss in a real toilet, slowly and clumsily dislodging himself from Marty like he’s made of sun-warmed taffy. Doesn’t mention it as he helps Rust up from the bed on creaking joints, bearing most of his weight down the hall until they get to the bathroom door.

Later, when they’re sipping at orange juice disguised in coffee cups and picking around eggs and toast, Marty shoulders headlong into the silence and mentions something about going to town to pick up another bed, maybe switch the sofa for a pull-out couch or something— _y’know_ , he says, _something convenient._

Rust just draws his eyes up from the depths of his mug, glassy and bloodshot in the morning light, and levels them steady on Marty. “If it isn’t bothering you none,” he says, “don’t feel like you need to redecorate on my account.”

Marty never does buy another bed.  
  



	2. one favor

Less than twenty-four hours after they split from Lafayette General, Maggie’s on the other end of Marty’s cell and practically fit to be tied.

“This isn’t news to anybody,” she starts in, “but you must be out of your goddamn mind. What if he rips those stitches out? What if he bleeds out on your living room floor, Marty? What then?”

Marty sighs and massages his temples with a thumb and forefinger. “Maggie, I didn’t—”

“You didn’t what? _Think?_ Because that—” she barks out a laugh that sounds half-crazed, “—that much is pretty obvious.”

“Jesus Christ, will you just listen to me?” Marty hisses, throwing a furtive glance down the hall at his bedroom door. “Rust’s fine, he’s asleep right now and I’m going to pick up his prescriptions later. He didn’t want to be holed up in there anymore, laid up in a hospital bed like some kind of fucking invalid. Can you blame the guy? Least around here it doesn’t smell like death and he can get a half-decent meal.”

Maggie laughs again at that, this time high and dry, and he's left to wonder which part of it was funny. She's tapping something on the other end, like nails against a hard countertop. “How long are you going to keep him there with you?” she asks.

“Long as it takes for him to get back on his feet.” Marty clears his throat. “Well, so long—so long as he wants to stay, that is.”

Silence crackles over the line for a few beats. “And how long do you think that’s going to be?”

The question has an edge to it that Marty can’t quite put his finger on, something that sounds more like curiosity than accusation. “Can’t really say,” he tells her, slowly drawing out the words. “He’s in a weird place right now. Still coming to terms with everything, you know? Shit’s been weighing on him for seventeen years and now it’s all over and done with. He’s got to change up gears, big time.”

“And you’re sure you can take care of him?" Maggie asks. "Get all his medications organized, make sure he gets plenty of fluids, keeps everything clean? If you see any weird drainage, Marty, you better drop everything and—”

“I’ve got it, Mags, for Christ’s sake. Rust is a big boy and lax as you are to believe it, I’m more than capable of managing from here on out. I’m working from home right now so I can keep an eye on him. Everything is under control." He laughs then despite himself, and whether it's confidence or hysteria bubbling up past his lips there's no real telling, but the sound of it seems enough to make Maggie ease off.

“Okay,” she breathes out after a moment, and Marty can almost see her there, raking a hand through her hair and staring at a fixed point on the ceiling. “Okay. I just—I’m just worried about him, is all.”

“Yeah, well me too, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Sometimes, Marty, I worry—” Maggie’s voice cuts off abruptly, like the words got caught behind her teeth and can’t quite break free.

Marty stiffens. “You what?”

“Just do me one favor,” she says, softer this time, “and don’t hurt Rust like you hurt me.”

Marty still hasn’t pulled his phone away from his ear five minutes after she ends the call.  
  



	3. another time

“I’m taking your ass to the barber today,” Marty says from the bathroom doorway, watching Rust pull a grimace as he tries to get his arms up far enough to tie his hair back. That lasts all of about two seconds before he’s batting the other man’s hands away and picking a hair tie up off the counter. “Here—Christ, you’re gonna rip your fucking stitches out doing this shit, let me.”

Rust leans forward and braces his hands on the edge of the sink, following Marty’s movements in the mirror. “You gonna braid some flowers and ribbon in there for me?”

“Shut up, I used to do the girls’ hair sometimes when they were little, it ain’t that hard.” Marty makes one final twist with the tie before dropping his hands to clap against his thighs. “There, finished. Damn near looks halfway decent.”

“Didn’t know you cared that much, Marty,” Rust says, reaching for his toothbrush as Marty retreats back to lean in the doorway.

“Yeah, well I’m tired of you walking around looking like trailer park Jesus. I don’t know why you insist on these $2 haircuts—back in ’02 you looked like a fuckin’ buzzard, and now it’s the NASCAR fan special, if even that.”

“Think I’m sensing a little bitterness in your tone, there. Some might chalk that up to envy.” Rust squeezes a dollop of toothpaste out on his brush before bringing it up to pause in front of his mouth, briefly catching Marty’s eye in the mirror. “Least I’ve still got my hair.”

“Unless I buzz it off in your fucking sleep,” Marty says, pushing off the doorjamb and making his way down the hall. Rust can hear him banging around in the kitchen. “Get ready,” he calls out, “because we’re going.”  
  


* * *  
  


The barber finishes squaring up the back of Rust’s neck and thumbs off his clippers. “There you go,” he says, kicking the lifeless remnants of the ponytail across the tile floor. “Feel better?”

Marty stands up from his spot near the door and moves in for a closer inspection. “Well shit,” he says, “compared to before you look like a fuckin’ movie star. What’s that one guy’s name? Talks like he’s stoned all the time, always taking his shirt off—hell if I can remember.”

“You keeping the mustache?” the barber asks, slowly looking from Marty to Rust with an eyebrow askew, and Rust twists his mouth up in a short-lived bow before giving a curt shake of his head.

“I reckon not,” he says. “It’s losing the battle whether you shave it off or my publicity agent over there ties me down and does it himself. Let it go.”  
  


* * *  
  


Marty presses a generous tip into the barber’s hand before they leave and then leads Rust out the door into the Louisiana sunshine. The buttery light bounces off his hair and makes it shine weak honey-blonde in the early afternoon, more grey than rich brown these days, and it’s all Marty can do to keep from reaching up to touch it.

“Hell,” he says, “if we weren’t both so old and worn out I’d almost think it was ’95 again. You just dropped ten, fifteen years.” He pauses for the most fleeting moment, like the words that come next were carefully picked out in advance. “You know, I bet we could hit up a city bar tonight and you’d drown in pussy.”

Rust squints in the brightness as they close in on Marty’s car, busy fishing a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket. “As tempting as that sounds, Marty, I’m still stapled together around the middle and would sooner drop dead than get within ten feet of a place like that." He puts the light between his teeth and doesn't fight Marty's hand where it's come to settle around his waist. "Thinking I’d rather go for a bowl of gumbo from that place down by the river, if you'd be so willing to oblige.”

“Really?” Marty says, helping Rust ease down into the passenger seat. The word sounds brighter in his mouth than any genuine disappointment would suggest. “Another time, then, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Rust murmurs, studying his new reflection in the tinted window when Marty jams the door shut and walks around to the other side. “Maybe another time.”  
  
  



	4. pills

Every morning and evening, Marty counts out Rust’s pills and brings them to him in a shot glass that has _Poche’s Fish N’ Camp_ painted on the side in cracking red letters. One blue capsule, two little white pills, a pink tablet scored for halving, and all the rest hidden in a filing cabinet in Marty’s office even though they both know damn well that Rust could crack the lock in half a heartbeat.

Rust generally necks them dry but he’ll take the ice water Marty offers him anyhow, watching condensation well and bead down the glass until it pools in a wet ring on the coffee table. Marty will notice after about ten minutes and say _Jesus Christ, Rust, you’re gonna ruin the lacquer_ and get up to squeegee the water off the table with his hand before slipping a coaster under the glass.

Sometimes Rust thinks about cough syrup and quaaludes and snorting up a few lines of cartel coke so fucking pure that it lights his brain up like a god damn solar flare, makes his blood vibrate around his bones and gets his dick up at half-mast with just one sniff, and then Marty will ask him to pass the TV remote, looks over after a few beats and says, “It’s 72 degrees in here, why are you sweating?”

Every morning and evening Marty counts out Rust’s pills. After a few weeks, he stops being surprised when there are never any missing.  
  
  



	5. flight feathers

Rust’s fresh out of the shower one night when Marty catches him walking between the bathroom and bedroom, stark naked save for a towel slung low around his hips. As he passes by he hears Marty call out from his office, still bent down over a case file. “How’re those stitches doing?”

He doesn’t bother to close the bedroom door while he drops his towel and pulls on a pair of sweatpants, underwear be damned. “Itching me to high hell, but it’ll pass.”

“You want me to take a look?”

“No need,” Rust says, walking back down the hall to the kitchen. “Drainage’s mostly stopped, I reckon I’ll be fine with just the soap and water treatment until they come out next week.” He opens the fridge and reaches for a beer before he remembers Marty hasn't stocked any there since he got rid of them sometime during the first week, making a point to pour the last three bottles down the sink and line them up on the counter, twelve-ounce reminders of how shit was gonna be. That leaves coffee creamer, tap water, and Marty’s pitcher of green tea as the sole successors.

Rust hoists the green tea out and sets it down on the counter before sliding open the dishwasher to pull out a clean glass. Marty’s leaning against the bar when he turns back around, idly running the cap-end of an ink pen through the hair above his ear.

“You put any moisturizer around the sutures to help the itching?” he asks, clapping the pen down on the countertop.

Rust swivels the lid open on the green tea and fills the glass up about a fourth of the way, gives one slow shake of his head while he takes a swig. “Don’t know how you drink this shit,” he says, pulling his lips back over his teeth in a weak grimace. “Tastes like strained dishwater.”

“Probably on account of it burning all the fucking poison out of you,” Marty murmurs, eyes dropping down to settle on the angry scar curving up along the left side of Rust’s abdomen. “Come back here for a minute,” he says, turning to make for the bedroom. “I’ve got some lotion that might help.”

“Marty, I don’t need—”

“Yeah, you do, now c’mon.”

Rust puts the pitcher back in the fridge and pads down the hallway after Marty as slow as he can manage, bare feet making a soft _shush-shush_ sound on the carpet. When he walks in Marty’s sitting on the edge of the bed, busy digging something out of his bedside table.

“That better not be any kind of fuckin’ lube,” Rust says, coming around to stand at the foot of the bed.

“You wish,” Marty says, pulling the bottle out and uncapping the top. “It’s lotion with Vitamin E, smartass—supposed to help with the itching and heal up the scar faster.”

Rust holds out his hand to take it, but Marty swings his legs up on the bed and pats the mattress. “Hop on up here, cowboy.”

“Jesus, Marty, you’d think I’d gotten both my arms sawed off.” Even as he complains, he sinks down on the bed and gradually stretches out until he’s lying on his back, arms tucked in close against his body. “Can’t hardly believe I let you do this shit.”

“Somebody’s gotta take care of your ungrateful punk ass,” Marty says, squeezing a dollop of lotion out onto his fingers. He scoots closer, the old bed frame groaning in feeble complaint, until his knees are brushing against Rust’s side. “Might be cold,” he says. “Keep still.”

Rust stares at the ceiling while Marty works his fingertips around the perimeter of the scar, gently rubbing tiny circles along the taut ridge of pink skin. Rust’s looked at it in the mirror enough, eyes trailing over the tender line that starts just below his navel and stretches upward in a subtle curve, cutting like a lopsided crescent moon through the otherwise smooth skin of his belly. The outer row of stitches crisscross like tiny black railroad tracks from one end to the other, and he vaguely wonders, somewhere down deep in the back of his mind, if they’re not the only things that’ve been keeping him held together since Carcosa.

“How’s that feeling?” Marty murmurs.

“Well you weren’t lying,” Rust says, eyelids starting to sink. Marty’s hands have warmed up and feel pretty damn good lightly kneading along the rough-hewn skin. “Itching’s startin’ to quit already.”

“I figured as much. Now let me see your arm.”

Rust wordlessly brings his right arm up and drapes it over his middle, peering down through the sparse fan of his lashes to watch the other man rub a thumb over the gouge Childress’s hammer left up in the junction near his elbow.

“Guess your bird lost some flight feathers,” Marty says, fingers working around the scab. The tip of the bird’s wing sits partially disembodied now, interrupted by the growth of new pink skin.

“Mmm," Rust hums in his chest. "Don’t reckon he plans on flying off any time soon.”

Marty looks away from his work to steal a glance at Rust, gnawing on the inside of his cheek. His hands have stopped moving. When the words finally come they don't quite get stuck is his craw like he thought they would, slip out quiet but whole all the same. “Yeah," he says. "And what about you?”

Rust turns his head on the pillow to look up at Marty, a damp wave of hair falling down against his temple. The air around them charges up for a second, like maybe it’d spark if you hit it just right, but then it all rolls and ebbs away, falling back into the easy stillness from before.

There’s no real telling who moves first, if it’s Rust who sits up or if Marty leans down to reach him, but they end up meeting somewhere in the middle, mouths coming together in the barest little brush of a kiss, all wind-chafed lips and the soft scratch of day-old stubble.

Marty’s face is flushed pink when they pull apart, but he looks a little dazed, eyes gone fuzzy and out of focus. “Well shit,” he says, clearing his throat. “Those whiskers done threw me off a little, but that wasn’t half bad.”

Rust eases back down against his pillow and breathes out a little sigh. His eyes flick up to meet Marty’s, dark blue boring into a brighter shade, and crinkle up at the edges just barely enough to give him away.  
  
“Maybe you’d better start getting used to it,” is all he says.

 


	6. cold sweat

The nightmares always end with mangled tricycles and skull-faced kings. Ruby dark blood on his hands and in his eyes, pouring like libations from his mouth even though he knows none of it’s his; a yellow muslin shroud draped over a tiny, broken body; a swirling vortex of time come and gone that embraces him like an old friend and whispers _come and die with me, little priest_.

Rust will wake up in a cold sweat every time, nerves scourged raw with his throat flayed to match, and he knows he probably screams her name out in his sleep—can damn near taste it on his tongue—, but Marty will never admit to it, just says, “Ain’t nothing to be ashamed of, man, you’re alright now, you’re alright.”

They lay next to one another in the dark and wait for Rust’s breathing to even out, and eventually the flame on that old zippo will flick into life, but Marty doesn’t complain about lighting up in the bedroom anymore. At least not on nights like these, when he makes deals with an unseen God for any ray of light to split open the blackness.  
  



	7. penance

Macie’s call comes in on a Wednesday morning.

“Hey Dad,” she says when Marty picks up. “It’s been a little while.”

“Macie?” Marty laughs on reflex, always taken aback by how much she sounds like Maggie. “Hey darlin’, hey—how are you doing? Is everything alright?”

“Everything’s fine _._ How have you been holding up?”

“Can’t complain,” he says. “Healed right up no problem, been staying busy here at the house with PI stuff. Are you sure you’re okay? And Audrey? I haven’t heard—”

“You could call us, too, you know,” Macie says, gently cutting in over him. “The phone line goes both ways, and you don’t need to have some big story to tell every time. Just calling to talk is always okay.” She pauses to blow out a little sigh that whispers in his ear like parched leaves. “But that’s not what I called about. I—I wanted to ask you something.”

Marty sits rigid in his chair. “I’m listening.”

She laughs, nervous, like maybe she’s unsure of what she’s about to say. “If Audrey and I could make it out there this weekend for a few days, would you mind if we stayed the night? You know, just—just to spend some time with you.”

A gust of air that sounds like a slashed tire rushes out of Marty’s lungs. “Well of course, I’d love that, honey—God, what a surprise.” His jaw works like it’s on a loose hinge, scrambling for something to say. “I mean, there ain’t much by way of entertainment out here but I’m sure we can figure something out. What’s the big occasion? Y’all haven’t stayed with me since you were fresh out of high school and your mama was remodeling her house, seems like.”

Macie laughs again but this time the sound of it rings hollow. “It’s Father’s Day this weekend, dad.”

And if Marty has to take a minute before he can answer her, well, at least Rust isn’t home to see him scrub away at the raw heat that wells up in his eyes.

“Did your mother put you up to this?” he eventually rasps out, trying to clear his throat. “Macie, Christ knows I’d love to have you girls over here, but if she’s trying to make you feel bad like it’s something you have to do after—”

“We wanted to, dad—both of us. Audrey…she has her way about her, you know, but she wants to come just as much. I know we’re grown now, but that doesn’t have to mean anything, does it? We still want to see you.”

“Thanks, sweetheart,” Marty says, quiet. “You girls are too good to an old man who don’t deserve it.”

Macie’s voice breaks back in abruptly like she had put her hand over the receiver. “Sorry, somebody was asking me a question. When’s a good time for us to get there, you think?”

Rust’s face suddenly comes to him like a vision and his heart stutters in his chest. “Now Mace, I don’t know if your mama told you, but I’ve got company here with me right now—an, uh, old friend of mine.”

“Rust?” she says, like it’s the most normal thing in the world. “I know. He doesn’t mind us coming, does he?”

“He doesn’t,” Marty blurts out, a little too fast. “He’s just a little off his game right now, and I don’t want y’all feeling uncomfortable, considering…well, considering everything, you know.”

That doesn’t even faze Macie. “So we’ll be there Friday around dinner, if that’s okay? And don’t worry about making up any kind of bed, I know Rust is probably using the spare. We’ve got some air mattresses as long as you’ve got the floor space.”

“Uh, yeah,” Marty says, foggy-headed. “Yeah, that’s good. Alright.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Macie says. “Listen dad, I gotta run, but if anything changes let me know—otherwise we’ll see you around five-ish on Friday, okay?”

After she disconnects, Marty doesn’t move from his office chair until he hears Rust’s truck pull up outside. Whether that’s minutes or hours later, he doesn’t really know. He just looks out the window into the brightening day and thinks long and hard about lost time.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Rust walks through the door, beer and grocery bags in hand, and finds Marty sitting in his recliner, silently staring at the backs of his hands where they lay against the cushioned armrests.

“Never pegged you as one for introspective meditation, Marty,” Rust says, dropping the plastic bags off on the counter. He turns around and Marty hasn’t moved. “Shit, are you having a stroke?”

“The girls,” Marty says. “Macie and Audrey. They’re coming to spend the weekend.”

Rust leans back against the counter and glances at his watch; 11:38. He pulls a beer off the six-ring and cracks it open anyways. “When’s the last time you saw them?”

“Couple days after I got out of the hospital, when you were still laid up there.”

“Been a bit, then.”

Marty turns to face Rust and drags a hand through what’s left of his hair. “Sunday is Father’s Day. Macie said they wanted to spend it here with me.”

Rust sets his beer down on the counter and blinks. “Well shit, Marty, that’s great.”

“They know you’re staying here, I think Maggie must’ve told them, but they don’t know I only have one bed. I gotta go buy a goddamn blowup mattress or something, otherwise I reckon heads are gonna roll. And all your shit’s here, fuckin’ Christ.”

Rust has his head bowed down low, chin tucked close against his chest. “You want me to go somewhere?” he asks, serious.

“No,” Marty immediately says. “No, I want you here. I just—shit, man, what would you do?”

As soon at the words hit the air he knows it was the wrong fucking thing to say.

Rust lifts his head, eyes gone hard enough to cut glass. “I wouldn’t give one solitary semblance of a fuck, Marty. I’d spend the weekend with my daughter. I’d make her favorite dinner or whatever the fuck she wanted. I’d tell her I loved her. And I’d make sure she knew that—knew it like she knew how to breathe.”

He picks his beer up off the counter and walks stiff-shouldered back outside into the humid drape of morning, letting the door slam shut behind him. Without a word, Marty pulls himself up off the recliner and starts putting the groceries away. He eyeballs the six-pack Rust left behind for a few seconds, sighs, and pulls one off the ring.  
  


* * *  
  


In the two days between Macie’s call and the girls’ arrival, Marty goes on two more grocery runs, scrubs down the kitchen and bathroom until they’re damn near gleaming, and even drags ass into a Bed Bath & Beyond to buy a throw pillow for the couch. But in all that time, never does he come back home with an air mattress. Rust doesn’t make any real move to remind him, but on Friday morning when he rolls over onto his back and opens his eyes, Marty’s already awake, picking at a loose thread on the sheet pulled up over his chest.

“They’re gonna know,” is all he says.

“Course they’re gonna know,” Rust says, slowly swinging his legs over the side of the bed to pull on a pair of sweatpants. “You never were too good at giving women credit for their ability to read you like a fucking book, Marty.”

The conversation ends there. Rust pads out of the room and makes way for the kitchen, leaving Marty to watch the ceiling fan rotate in lazy circles.

He throws the sheet back and stretches before standing up. The digital clock next to the bed reads 7:35. Macie and Audrey are due to arrive later in the day and he’s got a couple files’ worth of case research to wade through with Rust until then.

“Oh, here go hell come,” he mutters, following the rich smell of brewing coffee down the hall and into the kitchen.  
  


* * *  
  


Somehow everything goes over without a hitch.

At a quarter past five Audrey’s old Volkswagen pulls up outside and the girls hop down on the pavement with overnight bags and shy smiles in tow. Marty’s there to meet them with fleeting one-armed hugs and rattled-off greetings comprised of whatever the fuck pops into his head, and that’s pretty run-of-the-mill as far as things go, but he’s surprised when Macie walks up to Rust—standing a-ways off by the door with his sleepy-eyed pensive look in place—and leans in to embrace him. He stands there like a stone pillar at first, lines of his body pulled tighter than a rubber band stretched three feet past snapping, but then his hand comes up at the last second, fingertips brushing against the back of her elbow before she steps away and lets him go.

“It’s been a long time,” Macie says, smiling up at him. “How have you been?”

Marty expects a hundred different things to come out of Rust’s mouth, but not the upturned quirk of his lips and a low-murmured, “Not too bad, not too bad.”

Audrey stands her ground a few feet away, comfortable enough but hesitant to move in. “Hi, Rust,” she says, offering up a tiny bow of a smile that drags him back damn near twenty years, back into a kitchen chair that felt wrong and too-hard digging into his back, back into a bouquet of half-dead flowers that Maggie put in her best crystal vase anyways, back into pretending not to see two little girls whispering behind their hands about _look how handsome he is, Mace, do you think he’ll let us do his hair all pretty?_

The memory fades out but this bigger, realer Audrey’s still standing there, watching him with a calculating sort of look on her face like maybe she’s trying to break him down into colors and shapes, like maybe she’s turning him into his own rough-textured picture of the world.

“Let me help you with your bag,” Rust says, cutting into the stillness, and she lets him take her duffel from her hands, silently follows him inside with Macie and Marty bringing up the rear.  
  


* * *  
  
  


After dinner, Rust carries a stack of dishes into the kitchen while Macie keeps Marty hostage at the table, knee-deep in a conversation about life off at LSU. Audrey slips in a few minutes later to stand beside him at the sink, picking up a dish towel and holding it open. “You wash, I’ll dry,” she says, and Rust wordlessly hands her a clean dinner plate.

“Real good of you to come see your dad like this,” he says after a few beats of nothing but water sloshing around in the sink. “He’s not much good at saying it, but he loves you girls a lot.”

“I know,” Audrey says, and it comes out more like a reflex than anything else, a timeworn muscle memory from someplace long ago, but that’s not on her mind right now. She’s busy watching Rust. He has his sleeves rolled slap-dash up to the elbows and suds are starting to climb his arms, filming over faded black ink with bubbles. He passes her a tea glass and she dries it without looking.

“Would you let me paint you?” she asks, watching his hands move. “For an exhibition piece.”

A chuckle rumbles deep in Rust’s chest, the first one she’s heard since she walked in earlier that afternoon, and it’s already gone before she can really catch it. “You want to use somebody as ugly and worn out as me?” he asks. “Seems like a waste of perfectly good paint.”

Audrey chances a look at his face, already shifted back down into a neutral expression. He’s not ugly—wasn’t back in ’95 when he was sitting at her mother’s table eating supper like a man walking down death row, isn’t ugly now, even with his greying hair and tired eyes. “I have some supplies in my trunk and it’d only take a few short sittings,” she says. “Couple hours tonight, maybe one or two on Saturday tops. I work fast—you can ask Macie.”

“I never was much of one for getting my picture taken, much less having an honest-to-God portrait made. Never really felt the need for that sort of thing.” He stops for a moment, regrouping. “Not after my daughter passed, anyhow.”

She sets the dishtowel down but silently resolves not to beg. “You’d be doing me a really big favor. It’d be the last piece I need before the showing.”

Rust pulls his hands out of the dishwater and rests them against the edge of the sink. “This is a weekend for you to spend time with your daddy,” he says, quiet. “I don’t want you bothering any with me.”

“You think he has a full itinerary planned out?’ Audrey laughs, high and brittle. “Please. We’ll be scrambling to even get a card game going by tomorrow night and you know it.”

He touches his chin to his shoulder, then, really looking at her for the first time since they started in on the dishes. She looks nothing like the little girl he remembers, but he can see Maggie in the bow of her lips, Marty’s bulldog determination in the set of her jaw. “You hardly even know me, Audrey."

“Some of the most celebrated paintings in history were rendered using prostitutes the artist pulled in off the street,” she says. “I think I know you a little better than that.”

Rust looks out the window over the sink and their eyes meet in the reflection in the glass. “Do you?” he asks. There’s no challenge in his voice; the question is an honest one. _Do you really know me?_

“No,” Audrey admits, picking her dishtowel back up. “But then again, I don’t suppose anybody does, do they?”  
  


* * *  
  


Marty looks startled when Audrey totes an easel and tackle box full of supplies back in from her car and asks if she can set up in the living room. “Uh, that’s fine, honey,” he says. “What do you plan on painting?”

Audrey smiles as she begins stretching a canvas. “Rust.”

 _“Rust?”_ Marty nearly shouts. “Does he know this yet?”

“Sure do,” Rust says, coming down the hallway with an old newspaper in hand. He stoops down low and spreads a few pieces out over the carpet before setting Audrey’s easel on top.

“I’m sorry,” Marty says, slowly looking between the two of them. “Are you meaning to tell me you’re going to get Mr. Nihilist Christ here to sit still long enough for a portrait?”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Audrey says, not looking up from where she’s sorting through brushes and setting them out on a TV dinner table. “Rust agreed to sit through a session for my last exhibition piece.”

Marty grunts to himself. “Never thought I’d see the day, but knock yourselves out. Suppose we were in for a quiet evening anyhow.” He drops down onto the couch next to Macie and palms the back of his neck. “You mind if Mace and I sit here and watch? Maybe I can soak in some culture for once.”

“Be my guest,” Audrey says, finishing with her setup. Marty turns on the television down low in the background and starts surfing through channels, speaking in hushed tones to Macie about her outlook on the Saints.

“Where do you want me?” Rust asks from the edges of Audrey’s peripheral vision, making his best effort not to curl in on himself where he stands.

“Up on the bar stool I moved near the wall,” she says with a flourish of her hand, all business. “Socks off, please.”

Rust shucks his socks off and gets up on the stool, hooking one heel on the bottom rung and keeping his other foot flat on the floor. Audrey watches him closely, walking in a small arc to study his form from different angles, and then drags a floor lamp across the carpet until the yellow bowl of light is just above his head and casting him over with soft planes of shadow. He stiffens when she suddenly closes the space between them, lightly touching two fingers to the back of his shoulder.

“Lean forward a little bit,” she says, gently guiding him into position until he’s got his forearms braced flat across his knees, hands loosely clasped together between the wide spread of his legs. “Other foot up on the stool—good, stay right there.”

Macie has forgone all talk of the Saints to watch. “She does this to everybody who models,” she says, giving a theatrical roll of her eyes. “Get ready to spend the next few hours as a living mannequin.”

Audrey steps back to look at Rust once more, this time a faint crease drawn between her brows. Her hand comes up to her mouth, briefly, before falling away. “Could you take your shirt off?” she asks.

Rust keeps his eyes from straying to Marty and clears his throat, nods once, and reaches up to shrug his button-up off his shoulders. When he’s pulled his undershirt up over his head and thrown it to the side, he makes quick work of getting back into the position Audrey had him in before. The air conditioning blows in cold from a vent above, raising little spots of gooseflesh along the backs of his forearms.

The room has gone distinctly quiet, and when he looks up Audrey is already seated behind her easel with a pencil in hand, sketching out sweeping, fluid lines along the white canvas. Marty’s eyes have purposefully strayed back to the television, but the weight of Macie’s gaze has gone right to his torso where it drags over each scar so long he thinks he can feel it.

“What’s that tattoo?” she asks him, voice petal-soft. “The one above your heart.”

“Part of the vegvísir,” Rust says, reaching up to trace the lines on his chest by memory. “An Icelandic stave meant to help the bearer navigate through rough weather.”

“Huh,” Marty says, cutting his eyes away from the TV. “You never told me that.”

Rust returns Marty’s gaze, slow and fluid like the lazy lob of a whip. “You never asked.”

He’ll catch Macie looking between them later on in the night, and even though she doesn’t say anything—not even when it pans out that, well shit, the sofa isn’t really a foldout bed after all—there’s something unmistakable in the set of her features, something that reminds him of late-night phone calls where Maggie Hart asked questions about things she already knew the answers to. There’s no malice hidden in her face, but it still reads like a small victory that he knows all too well.

 _I thought so_ , it says. _I thought so._  


* * *  
  


It takes Audrey four hours the following evening to finish the portrait, but Rust won’t see the final piece until two weekends later.

When they first sit down not too long after returning home from dinner down by the fish camp, she watches Rust a while, glancing back and forth between him and the canvas. “Will dad let you light up in the house?” she asks, thinking back to the previous night when Rust slipped outside on periodic smoke breaks.

Marty is in the kitchen, trying not to burn the shit out of a batch of low-fat rice krispie treats melting on the stove. “Just—god damn, this shit’s like concrete—just open the window, would you?”

Rust watches Audrey mix a new color on her palette and breathes in the smell of caramelized sugar, letting it coat the back of his throat. “If you want to document the full extent of my vices,” he says, deadpan, “we’re gonna need a six-pack of corner store booze and a bottle of Robitussin.”

“I’ve had a vision of sorts,” Audrey says, ignoring him in favor of picking up the half-empty pack of Camels off the counter. “I think this’ll add something to the piece.” She presses the carton into his hand and watches as he taps a light out and wedges it between his lips, holding his lighter up to the tip before sucking down a deep pull. Rust mechanically falls back into pose, blowing a stream of blue-violet smoke from the corner of his mouth as Audrey settles back in front of her easel.

“Let’s see who finishes first,” Rust says, peering in at his remaining cigarettes. He taps ash into a coffee cup sitting behind him on the windowsill and closes his eyes, half-listening to Macie laugh and ask Marty if he remembered to melt margarine in the saucepan before adding in the marshmallows.

And so the night wears on in brushstrokes and lazy curls of smoke, and as far as evenings in Rust’s life go, this one’s pretty damn decent.  
  


* * *  
  


Father’s Day whirs past in a blur of bright colors and undiluted sunshine and a strange potpurri of perfumes and colognes, and Rust doesn’t know if he’s ever seen Marty look so happy in the purest form of the word. Looking back, it’s some profound kind of shit.

They go out for brunch at this place where you get mimosa in a wine glass and butter pats shaped like flowers, and maybe Rust feels like he’s suffocating a little in his dress shirt and slacks but Marty’s smiling enough for the both of them and as long as he’s here with these three other people, refusing a fourth refill on the mimosa and watching Marty open a gift bag to find the ugliest goddamn fish-printed shirt he’s ever seen, it’s almost easy, not to think about Sophia.

His own personal collection of Father’s Day weekends are few in number, snuffed out before they even really got going. He tries to evoke one now, straining to sharpen the memory of Claire holding their daughter over him in bed as he woke up one morning, telling her to lean over and _give daddy a kiss, Sophia._

Her lips had landed just below his eye, warm and feather-light, and he’d reached out to take her from Claire, making her squeal with laughter as he covered her face with his own kisses.

“You okay, Rust?” Marty asks, and he comes to, finding all three pairs of Hart eyes trained on him.

“Sorry,” he says, pulling his fingers away from the spot below his eye. “Kinda stepped away for a second.”

He doesn’t think about Sophia for the rest of the day.  
  


* * *  
  


Macie and Audrey pack up to leave that evening after dinner, and this time Rust wraps his arms around them before they go, letting their soft hair whisper faintly against his cheek.

“Take care of Dad for us, Rust,” Macie says, giving his arm a gentle squeeze. The words are vague enough but they both know what she means. “Take care of yourself, too.”

Audrey scribbles something down on a piece of paper against the side of her car and presses it into Rust’s hand. “The gallery showing is in two weeks over in Baton Rouge,” she says. “It’d mean a lot if you both could be there.”

Marty looks a little stricken, eyes suspiciously red-rimmed, but he holds the line and keeps it together, kisses both girls goodbye and watches them drive off into the falling drape of dusk.

When they’re gone, Rust reaches up and rests his palm in the middle of Marty’s back.

“I can’t believe they’re grown,” Marty says, sniffing. “You turn around for two minutes and half your fucking life’s flown by.”

“Doesn’t matter if they’re grown,” Rust says. “They’ll always be your little girls, Marty.”

Marty huffs out a laugh, chancing a look at Rust in the deepening twilight. “That may be the most heartfelt sissy shit that’s ever come out of your mouth.”

“Gotta keep you on your toes,” Rust says, sliding his hand down to Marty’s hip and turning to steer them back inside.  
  


* * *  
  


Two weeks later, Rust is standing in an art gallery somewhere in uptown Baton Rouge, trying not to watch the spotlights above as they swirl into a shower of shooting stars and chase one another across the darkened ceiling.

Marty’s not too far away with a glass of punch in hand, standing in front of a six by eight foot canvas washed over with an opaque layer of golden yellow. A single red tulip has been painted in the center, no bigger than a real one.

“Fifteen hundred dollars for this shit,” he says when Rust walks up beside him, “and it’s not doing a damn thing but giving me PTSD flashbacks.”

“One of the primary purposes of art is to invoke an unsolicited psychological response in the viewer,” Rust says, feeling the yellow begin to sink deep down in his gut, blossoming there like a wet heat. “Seems to me, whoever painted this just cashed in their fifteen hundred dollars.”

“Well it ain’t coming out of my pocket, I can tell you that much,” Marty scoffs, turning to move along to the next painting. “Where do you reckon you’re hanging up in this joint? All these people here, I haven’t seen hide nor hair of Audrey yet.”

They walk along the gallery floor together, Rust tasting and touching morsels of color and light, Marty muttering that he could probably recreate half the abstract pieces blind with one arm tied behind his back. They stop in front of an oil painting depicting a crawfish boil dumped out on an old wooden table, mixed in with wreckage and dead, bloated bodies from the destruction Katrina wrought on the coast.

Marty knocks back his punch and sucks in a stream of air through his teeth. “That is some heavy shit, man. Giving me heartburn just looking at it.”

“I was up in Alaska when the hurricane hit,” Rust says, eyes scanning over the painting. “Didn’t even know about it until we came in off a week-long crab troll.” He steps away, gravitating back to Marty’s side. “Time was different up there, like it didn’t seem to coincide with the rest of the world’s bullshit. Sometimes you’d be off a job for a week or two and it’d get so fucking quiet that you’d forget you were living.”

“Dad—Rust!” Audrey’s voice suddenly calls out, ringing clear over the din in the gallery. She rushes over to them as fast as her high heels can take her, hair curled up in ringlets around her beaming face. “You made it!”

“Course we made it,” Marty says, pulling her into a brief hug. “Rust has been reminding me near about every day for the past week.”

“Well come on over and see the finished piece,” Audrey says, gesturing for them to follow her lead. “It’s been the most popular one in my exhibit by a landslide.”

They weave through the mingling crowd to the back of the gallery where three paintings are set up under spotlight. A couple standing in front of the center canvas beckon Audrey over when they see her approaching, warmly congratulating her on the success of the piece. Audrey pulls them off to the side, and Marty and Rust immediately step into the vacant spot in front of the painting.

“Well god damn,” Marty says. “Look at that.”

It’s Rust all right, exalted in warm shades of brown and gold, surrounded by shadow stained with deeper tones of blue and grey. His torso is stripped down to nothing but bare skin scattered with the remnants of old ink and bygone tales of violence, sloping shoulders curving inward in timeworn renaissance lines laden with the weight of a hidden burden. A cigarette hangs slack in the corner of his mouth, tip glowing in a flash of ember orange, while the faint yellow from the floor lamp lights up like a bleeding halo behind him.

Audrey has made him into a martyr.

“Saint Rustin, patron of metaphysical bullshit,” Marty says, waggling his eyebrows. “I say she nailed your likeness down pat. I might've even placed a bid if this wasn’t the same thing I looked at over breakfast every morning.”

“Only good men die into martyrdom,” Rust says, quiet. “The idealist mentality was never something I ascribed to.”

“Well let’s see what she named it before you get your panties in a twist,” Marty says, stepping in to look at the printed plaque below the canvas. He has to pull his reading glasses out of his blazer pocket to decipher the fine print. “Huh.”

“What’s it say?” Rust asks, already itching down deep for a cigarette. Behind him, Audrey has just closed out a deal on the portrait for twelve hundred dollars, but he won’t know that for a few more moments.

Marty peers at him over the tops of his glasses. “Penance,” he says, turning back to appraise the painting. “She’s called it Penance.”

 

 


	8. early morning

There is a place hidden under the guise of early morning fog where tenderness sleeps in the bed between them, the kind of thing neither Rust nor Marty will ever openly admit to giving and taking but which they fall into together all the same.

As a rule they usually fuck hard and fast or not at all, and even those days are often few and far between, but sometimes when the sun is just beginning to stir and climb up on its throne above the earth—when the bedroom is still cast over in sleepy washes of grey that are soft and pliant to the touch—, they’ll meet somewhere in the middle, pushing and pulling clothes aside and away until there’s nothing but the two of them, all scarred skin and warm friction and lips ghosting over collarbones once cracked and pulse points once faded.

Marty knows there’s no mistaking that Rust’s all man, manifested in a thatch of coarse dark hair trailing south from his navel rather than shaved-bare pussy, the rasp of stubble-rough jaw and long-fingered calloused hands. He’s built with sharp angles and hard lines instead of soft swells and delicate curves, solid compact heat in place of sweet supple give, and maybe Marty never really wanted to fuck a man before in life but goddamn if Rust hasn't gone and shaken up the magic eight ball.

He’ll drag his mouth up over the scored ridge of Rust’s stomach, letting his teeth graze along the crescent scar there while reaching down to palm around the other man’s cock, and every time he hears Rust make those hitched little sighing breaths of his it’s nearly all he can do to not come apart right there on the spot.

Rust likes to touch and be touched, is real good about letting you know when you’ve done something right, and moans downright pretty into Marty’s mouth when he slots their hips together good and tight and starts in on a slow grind. He’ll cup a hand around the meat of Marty’s ass and jam a thigh up between his legs, trying to hit that sweet rhythm just right, and then it all builds from there until they’re both worn threadbare and half-shaking with sticky heat blossomed up between them.

Sometimes they fuck, most times they don’t, but on the mornings when they do it’ll drag out slow and easy, Marty usually tucking Rust up underneath him and pressing him down into the mattress, taking their time because the world is still sleeping and they’ve got nowhere to be, at least not right now. Rust will suck little love bites into the skin along Marty’s chest and neck, and Marty will press his hand against the raw heat of Rust’s souvenir from Carcosa, licking hot into the seam of his mouth until neither of them can scarcely think to breathe.

And they don’t ever talk about it, don’t acknowledge it outside the borders of four walls drenched in drowsy morning, but they give and take what they need while it lasts, let things unspoken pass between them until the grey half-light finally gives way and brightens into flushing dawn.  
  
  
  



	9. proud

Like osmosis or photosynthesis or some other inevitable process that happens naturally and comfortably without you really paying it any mind, Hart Investigative Solutions eventually turns into Hart & Cohle Investigative Solutions. There had once been about five seconds where Marty entertained the idea of rechristening as something like “Rusting Heart,” but then Rust had asked if he scribbled things like that inside his little pink diary and that had been the end of that.

On the morning the sign company comes out to officially cement _Cohle_ onto the office headquarters, Marty turns to Rust where they’re standing in the parking lot and squints at him in the breaking daylight.

“You ever think about how your name is Rustin Cohle?” he says. “Rust. Coal. Rusting Coal.”

Rust blows a stream of smoke from the corner of his mouth and watches the workers bolt a fiberglass _C_ onto the side of the building. “You just now figuring that out?”

“Well it occurred to me some odd years ago, I just never felt the need to mention it ‘til now.”

“Mmm,” Rust hums, sucking down another drag on his cigarette. “For all her shortcomings, I guess my mama had a real keen sense of humor about her.”

Marty brings his ritual mug of green tea up to his lips and takes a swig off the top. “I don’t reckon I see how naming your son ‘shit that’s corroded’ comma ‘shit that burns’ is all that funny. There’s no way that was just a coincidence.”

“Course it wasn’t,” Rust says. “Far as she was concerned I was the deadweight anchor that dropped and jammed up her smooth sailing. I suppose naming me what she did was her one big act of contempt, other than pawning me off to live with my pop first chance she got.” He drops his cigarette on the pavement and grinds it under his heel.

He won’t ever tell Marty about his earliest memories, the ones where he’s holding onto the hem of a cotton sundress printed with golden sunflowers, burying his nose in waves of honey-blonde hair that smell like Avon catalogue perfume, or rubbing a kiss off his forehead and finding his fingertips smeared with rosy lipstick. Not the one where he’s waking up in a strange house and asking for mama, except the man he was told to call Daddy is sitting on the edge of the bed with his hand cupped around a cigarette, saying, _looks like it’s just you and me now, ranger._

“You ever talk to her after?” Marty asks. “I mean, did she ever try and reach out to you at all?”

“Once,” Rust says, eyes following the workers as they maneuver around in the cherry picker. “Not until I was grown and married and already divorced. Found me in a phone book down in Texas and gave me a call right before I went fulltime Narco and fell off the fucking grid.”

Marty scans over the blank planes of Rust’s face, trying to catch a read even though there’s nothing there. “What’d she want?”

“To see me,” he says. “Told her there wasn’t anything worth looking at.”

“And that’s it?” Marty asks. When Rust doesn’t answer he lets out low-pitched whistle. “Jesus Christ, man, you are stone cold. You figure she’s dead yet?”

“Good chance, but I’ve got no reason to care either way. What does it matter?”

“I don’t know, nothing I guess,” Marty says, watching the paltry breeze card its fingers through Rust’s hair. “Maybe I was just thinking she’d be proud of you somehow. Your dad, too.”

Rust manages to laugh at that and sounds hollow when he does it. “Ain’t nothing to be proud of, Marty. What few good things I’ve done are two pennies dropped in a cesspool of shit.”

Marty bristles. “I know you like to beat your pessimistic asshole stick but don’t you ever get tired of feeling sorry for yourself?” He cuts his eyes over to Rust, chewing hard on the inside of his cheek. “And as a matter of fact, if I was your mama or your pop I’d be plenty proud, considering all the fucked shit you’ve seen and come out on the other side of. You telling me all those people we saved, all those families we brought closure to—that ain’t worth something?”

“Maybe I’m thinking it isn’t worth enough,” is all Rust says, gaze tossed somewhere up in the sky.

“How’s this look, boss?” one of the workers calls down from the cherry picker. _Cohle_ has been lined up next to _Hart_ on the stucco wall and centered around the new logo, a blue crest emblazoned with an _H_ and _C_.

“Looks great, boys,” Marty calls back, raising his mug to them. “Looks real clean.”

He turns and holds his free hand out in front of Rust, then, grinning despite himself. “Let me be the first to officially welcome you on board, Detective Cohle.”

Rust glances down at Marty’s hand and blinks once, eyes flicking back up like a switchblade. “You kidding me with that?” he says, and then wraps a hand around Marty’s upper arm and yanks him in close without warning, knocking their mouths together in a rough collision of a kiss. It takes about three seconds before one of the workers is letting out a shrill wolf whistle from above, another yelling, _aww_ _what the fuck y’all, I thought they was just business partners!_

Rust lets Marty go, stepping back to run his tongue over his bottom lip. “Glad to be part of the team, Detective Hart,” he says, cool as a fucking cucumber.

Marty clears his throat and blinks as if coming out of a daze, the hot flush climbing up his neck not having much to do with the early-morning sunlight. Most of his green tea has managed to slosh out on the pavement and he tosses up a half-assed middle finger for the workers who continue to hoot and holler behind them.

“Yeah, well you think your folks would be proud now, you bastard?” he asks, a little hoarse. “Jesus Christ, I’ll never hear the end of this.”

“Hell no,” Rust says, almost smiling. “But fuck ‘em.”  
  



	10. ghost

One day Marty wakes up and decides it’d do him and Rust both some good if they got a dog.

He and Maggie had never gotten one for the girls, substituting in the occasional hamster and short-lived goldfish throughout the small span of years where Audrey and Macie had insisted on that kind of thing—before parties and boys, before the divorce, before life and that big inevitable yank of the rug out from under his feet had happened. They’d always seemed content enough with their little rainbow plastic hamster wheels, and maybe he’d missed having some old mutt hanging around sometimes, completing the mirage of an American dream, but working cases on the state’s docket and chasing tail had kept him too damn busy to ever get stuck on remedying it.

And now, after everything, somehow the time and place feels right.

"How you do with surprises?" he asks Rust on a Saturday morning. He’s got one hip hitched up on the kitchen counter with a coffee cup brought halfway to his mouth, watching the other man rinse their breakfast dishes under the faucet.

"We gettin’ engaged for real this time?" Rust asks, not looking up from the sink, and Marty comes dangerously close to inhaling a lungful of coffee.

"Not quite," he chokes out, setting his mug down and running the back of his hand across his mouth. "I just figured—well. See, I wanted to get something for the house, but I think you’d better come with me, help pick it out."

Rust turns off the water and swivels around so he can rest his eyes on Marty, heavy-lidded but intrigued. His mouth barely moves when he speaks. “Like what?”

"I reckon that’d be the surprise, wouldn’t it?"

"Now you know I don’t do any of that kinky shit, Marty," Rust says, but he doesn’t argue when Marty tells him to fuck off and get dressed, nor does he put up a fight when Marty insists on driving the red pickup into town. Just swings up into the shotgun seat, lights a cigarette, and tells him to lead the way.  
  


* * *  
  
  


Rust’s eyes near about bug out of his head when Marty turns into the animal shelter parking lot.

"You must be fucking with me," he says, cigarette gone suspiciously lax in the corner of his mouth. “Here I thought you were dragging my ass to the Home Depot.”

Marty pulls into a spot and puts the truck in park. “Well I ain’t. Should’ve asked this before, but you’re not allergic to anything, are you? Other than speaking normal goddamn English.”  
  
"Naw," Rust says, stepping down onto the pavement and easing his door shut behind him. He meets Marty around back of the truck and flicks his cigarette butt away, shaking his head in some kind of skeptical appreciation like maybe he can’t believe he’s had one pulled over on him like this. "I gotta hand it to you, man, I never would’ve pegged this on you in a hundred years.”  
  
Marty grins at that. "I take it you’re surprised, then?"  
  
Rust watches him palm the back of his neck, can’t remember if Marty’s got sunburn or if he's actually blushing. “Shit,” he drawls out in one long syllable, cracking a sliver of a smile. “Yeah, I’d say so.”  
  
They walk inside, shoulder to shoulder, and are immediately greeted by a blast of cold air and the weak, soapy smell of antiseptic mixed with the unshakeable stink of dog. Rust watches Marty sign in at the front desk, printing out his name in cramped uppercase block letters.  
  
The woman behind the desk asks if they’re interested in seeing the dogs or the cats, and Marty gets her to point the way to the dog run. Rust waits until they step through an aluminum door into a rolling symphony of howls and endless barking before he turns on his heel to catch Marty’s eye. “Knowin’ you,” he deadpans, “I’m surprised we didn’t head straight for the pussy.”

Marty reaches around to grab a quick handful of Rust’s ass through his jeans and then grins hard enough to crack a tooth at the teenaged volunteer who suddenly stops dead in her tracks to blink at them.

"Don’t pay this one here any mind," he says, praying she can’t see the death grip he’s got on the meat of Rust’s ass cheek. "He’s a real joker, is all.”

Rust chuckles high in the back of his throat and the volunteer walks to the opposite end of the kennel, throwing them a fleeting look over her shoulder as she begins rinsing out water bowls. Once she’s preoccupied he knocks Marty’s hand away and hums to himself. “Pussy or not," he says, "I reckon you’ve always been a real ass man at heart.”

"You better pick out a damn dog before I put you up for surrender yourself," Marty says with no real heat, sidestepping away to gaze at a bluetick coonhound sprawled out along the floor of its kennel. "What do you think of this one?"

Rust peers in at the dog, skin bunched up in wrinkled folds around its face. “Don’t know if I’m partial to all the baying they do, plus we don’t have the acreage for him. Dog like that needs space to roam, span out.”  
  
They move past the coonhound and inspect the occupant of every new kennel, Marty stopping every so often to press his hand against the chain link gates or sweet-talk anybody who gives him puppy eyes. Rust looks like he’s sizing up potential perps in a police lineup, briefly reading over the laminated record sheets zip-tied to each dog’s stall before moving on to the next one. He keeps his hands planted in his pockets for the most part, watching the dogs with the sort of detached analytical interest that manages to dredge up old echoes of the words _Tax Man_ in Marty’s mind. If Rust hadn’t left his old ledger at home, he imagines he’d be taking down footnotes next to solemn little sketches of each one. _Too froufrou for Marty’s unwavering machismo. Handsome but statistically prone to hip dysplasia._ _Bound to chew the ever-loving shit out of my work shoes._  
  
"You got a problem or something you’re not letting on about?" Marty asks when they reach the end of the line, bracing his fingers on his hips. "Christ’s sake, I’ve seen folks get more excited about picking out a box of cereal."  
  
The volunteer from earlier chooses that moment to walk by and Rust reaches out into the open air between them, vaguely gestures like he’s trying to reel her in with two fingers. “Pardon, ma’am,” he says when she slows down enough to listen, “but whereabouts do you keep the cats?”  
  


* * *  
  
  


Twenty minutes later Rust has got a long-haired calico curled up in the crook of his arm, purring up a storm fit to rival Katrina. For the first time since they stepped foot inside the shelter there’s a hint of a smile drawing up the corner of his mouth.  
  
Marty’s sitting in a plastic chair in the corner with his elbows braced on his knees, shaking his head like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. “I’ll be damned,” he says. “I don’t even know what to say.”  
  
"Ain’t nothing to say," Rust says, gently scritching around the cat’s ears. She opens her eyes, revealing one golden yellow and the other springtime green. "We came, we saw, this here’s the one. I’ve found my winner."  
  
"How is it that you don’t like dogs?" Marty asks. An orange paw slowly creeps out from between the bars in the cage door behind him and he jumps when it bats at his sleeve. "What did a dog ever do to you?"  
  
"Nothing," Rust says. "But given my apparent knack for coming back from the edge of death with lives to spare, I figure I’m more aligned with the feline kind as familiar and kindred spirits."  
  
"I didn’t understand a single word of any of that hippie shit, but I hope you’re happy, because we’re officially a couple of old queers now."  
  
"Suits me just fine," is all Rust says, and Marty doesn’t have a comeback for that, can’t do anything but dumbly follow him out front to the adoption desk, leaving the room of mewling cats behind them.  


  
* * *

  
  
They’re driving home from the pet store, laden down with plastic bags full of who-the-hell-knows what for a cat when Marty turns the radio down and slides his eyes over to look at Rust. “You got a name picked out for her yet?”  
  
To her credit, the cat is one chilled out little fucker, having decided to politely perch on Rust’s lap in lieu of staying locked in her cardboard carrier. She twitches her ears at the sound of Marty’s voice, flexing a paw against the denim covering Rust’s thigh.  
  
Rust opens his mouth, closes it, and then opens it again. “I don’t know. I’ve only ever really named one thing, and I—I didn’t do it by myself.”  
  
Marty focuses back on the road and clears his throat. “Yeah, man,” he says, quiet. “I know.”

A drape of silence falls back over them, interrupted only by the soft undercurrent of the radio playing low. Rust wordlessly turns to stare out the window for a spell, and Marty doesn’t even hear him the first time he says it.  
  
"What was that?" he asks, straining to listen, half wondering if Rust had even spoken at all.  
  
"Ghost," Rust repeats, idly smoothing the pad of his thumb over a white patch on the cat’s forehead. "I reckon her name’s Ghost."  
  
  



	11. how far along

Audrey gets engaged to a boy named Orren just past the start of the New Year.

“What the fuck kind of name is this?” Marty says, squinting at the glossy cardstock announcement that Rust brings in with the mail. “Orren Arcturus Gunther. Looks like one of them names you hear coming off _Star Trek_ or something.”

Rust blinks and straightens from where he’s bent over shaking kibble into the cat’s dish. “They’ve scheduled the wedding for April. You’re telling me you’ve never met him?”

“Reckon not,” Marty says, rubbing his hand over his head. “Didn’t even know Audrey was seeing the guy, to be honest. You think she tells me shit like that?” He spits out a _pfft_ meant to pass as casual indifference, but Rust catches the look in his eye, knows the fact of the matter has got Marty cut deep enough to smart.

“The kid’s pretty new money,” Rust says by way of changing the subject, moving in closer to peer at the smiling couple over Marty’s shoulder. “Politician haircut, looks like something out of a department store catalog. That’s country club bourgeoisie if I ever saw it.”

“Audrey must take after her mother in that respect,” Marty says with a sigh, letting the announcement flutter across the countertop before massaging his knuckles into his eye sockets. “Shit, man, fuck if I’ve been paying any attention. Last I checked she was still seeing scrawny little kids who wore their mama’s makeup.”

Rust reaches to squeeze Marty’s shoulder before picking up the photo and slipping it under a _Ragin’ Cajuns_ magnet on the fridge. “Go on and give her a call,” he says, turning to walk down the hallway with Ghost trotting hot on his heels. “Thinking you need to ride out there and size up this Gunther kid for yourself.”

“And what about you?” Marty says to Rust’s retreating back. “If you think you’re getting out of this you got another thing coming, because I’m gonna need someone on standby in case this kid needs his ass lit up.”

“Got something I need to run through the system,” Rust’s voice calls out from the office.

Marty picks up his phone and finds Audrey in the address book, then pauses to look up as a crooked grin spreads like a falling shadow across his face. “You gonna run a background check?” he asks.

When it comes, Rust’s answer is laced with the barest hint of a smile. “I’m about three steps ahead of you, Marty.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


It turns out Orren Gunther in person is about as clean as his record—bright, shining, and pristine as an unblown whistle. Nails well-manicured, hair meticulously parted on the right, solid enough grip but skin too soft to have seen the likes of a bayou fishing camp or spent childhood summers squabbling around in the dirt. When he smiles full-on Marty has to fight off the urge to squint—that’s how white the fucker’s teeth are.

“Nice to finally meet you, Mr. Hart,” Orren says upon their first encounter in the foyer of some ritzy restaurant in Baton Rouge, holding Marty’s gaze while he goes in for a handshake. His accent’s something from the far-flung north and sounds alien amidst the telltale twangs of Louisiana. “Audrey’s told me all about you.”

“All bad things, I'm sure,” Marty says, chuckling lightly but flicking his eyes over to Audrey all the same. “Glad to know I can’t say likewise.”

Orren’s face screws up into a mildly bewildered expression but then Rust is stepping forward and taking his hand, murmuring a token, “Rust Cohle,” that’s timed to sync with his shake on the upswing.

“I remember seeing you in Audrey’s exhibition work a while back,” Orren says, giving him an earnest smile. “Great piece; it’s an honor to finally meet the man and inspiration—not to mention congratulate you in person for all the incredible detective work you and Mr. Hart pulled off last year. That was really quite remarkable.”

“Wasn’t much in the broad scheme of things,” Rust says, ignoring the familiar burn of Marty’s eyes boring into the side of his face. “We got lucky in more ways than one, had a lot of help along the way.”

“But we sure appreciate the sentiment all the same,” Marty cuts in, stepping in front of Rust to embrace Audrey and pull her in tight against his side. “How you been doing, sweetheart?”

“Fine, dad,” she says with a thin-lipped smile, smoothing a hand over the front of her dress. “I’m sorry we couldn’t meet up before now. Things just started rolling a little faster than I anticipated and I didn’t even really think to call.”

“S’alright, honey,” Marty says. “I’m just glad to be here celebrating with y’all now.” He turns to appraise Orren and his gaze doesn’t falter as he speaks. “It sure looks like we’ve got some real catching up to do.”

The restaurant hostess cranes around to seek them out in crowd, then. “Gunther, table for four?” she asks, waving them over with a smile.

“That’s us,” Orren says on an exhale, holding the crook of his elbow out for Audrey and leading the way once she hooks her arm with his. Rust and Marty bring up the rear a few steps behind, walking shoulder to shoulder while Marty murmurs in hushed tones.

“I already feel like some kind of fuckin’ backwoods hillbilly talking to this kid,” he tells Rust. “You think he’s gonna turn out to be a real hoity-toity? I know you’ve had to have caught a read by now, what with that silent watch shit you do.”

“It’s a possibility,” Rust says, bringing a hand up to his mouth to bite around a thumbnail. “Maybe he’s high maintenance, but I think Audrey’s smart about what she wants.”

“You reckon?”

“Yeah,” Rust says. “Like you said, I figure she had the good sense to learn that from Maggie.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


After their orders have settled on the table and alcohol has been measured and doled out, the evening inescapably opens up to deeper lines of conversation.

“So how long have you two been partners?” Orren asks, looking between Rust and Marty.

Rust makes a lame attempt to arch an eyebrow at the question but Marty catches it blind and takes off. “Well we were originally paired up back in ’95 working state CID, ran the circuit together for about seven years. Saw some crazy shit. Had a ten-year break before joining forces again, and Rust here just made partner at my—well _our_ , now—private investigation company. Hart & Cohle Investigative Solutions, operates out of Lafayette.”

Orren smiles and glances between them almost sheepishly. Audrey looks a bit stricken where she sits, like maybe she forgot to turn the stove off before leaving and is praying the house won’t burn to the ground in the meantime. She hasn’t touched her wine glass since they’ve been seated.

“But how long have you been _together_ , is what I meant,” Orren says.

“Together?” Marty asks, a little too loud.

“Coming up fast on a year,” Rust says, “though it feels like a hell of a lot longer than that.”

“Oh, _partners,_ ” Marty laughs, grip gone white-knuckled around his wine glass. “Partners, right. Shit. Yeah, well I’ve been taking care of Miss Daisy here for about a year or so, give or take. We, uh—we keep one another out of trouble, you know. Swing some pretty good teamwork from time to time.”

“That’s pretty impressive, how you capped off nearly twenty years of work with a relationship,” Orren says. “Most people would have chewed one another’s heads off before settling down like that.”

“Mmm,” Rust hums, thumping two fingers against Marty’s thigh under the table. “You’d be surprised.”

“But turn all that around for a second,” Marty says, tilting back to peer down the bridge of his nose at Orren. “We should be asking you about how long you and Audrey have been seeing one another, don’t you think? I don’t claim to know your business, but it seems like you’re rushing into things a little quick on the trigger.”

“I—uh. Well.” Orren’s gaze drops down to the tablecloth before drawing back up to settle on Audrey, mouth curled up into a fond smile. “We’ve been seeing one another for a little over a year. I met Audrey at one of her gallery showings—I’m an art buyer for an agency up north.”

“That so?” Marty says. “You make pretty good money, then.”

Orren laughs. “I’d like to think so.”

“And is art buying the kind of career you think you could support a family on?”

 _“Dad,”_ Audrey half-hisses, wadding her napkin up in one fist before dropping both into her lap. “Could you maybe not turn dinner into a big game of twenty questions? This isn’t just another one of your suspect interrogations.”

“Was I coming across like that?” Marty asks, eyebrows climbing high on his forehead. “I’m just trying to get to know the guy. Shoot, if this was a real interrogation Rust would be the one asking all the questions—and he’d have you broke down in about twenty minutes flat, guaranteed.”

“Well I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time to get fully acquainted before the big day,” Orren says, looking between them all with a worried crease cutting between his eyes. “Not—not that I mind any questions,” he’s quick to add. “Of course not.”

Like some kind of spectral reprieve, the waiter decides to return at that moment to take any dessert requests and begin clearing away the dinner plates. Orren and Audrey settle on a shared portion of tiramisu while Marty decides to order the salted caramel layer cake on a whim.

“You’re gonna take a few bites out of this when it comes,” he tells Rust, pushing away from the table and standing. “I’ll be back in a few, gotta use the men’s room. Play nice with the kids.”

When Marty disappears around the corner, Rust drains the last swig from his glass of wine and sits forward to brace his forearms against the table, head bowed over his hands. He looks up after a moment and regards Audrey from under the weight of heavy-drawn lids, punctuating the long exposure of his gaze with a slow, somnolent blink.

“At what point in the evening,” he says, words almost soft to the touch, “were you planning on telling your daddy that you’re pregnant?”

Audrey’s face immediately drains to a pallor that would rival the moon. “How did you know?” she rasps out.

“Not too hard to tell,” Rust says, picking up a piece of garnish off his plate and giving it an absentminded twirl between his fingers. “Quick engagement. You balked when your dad mentioned family, haven’t touched your wine all night. And I’ve been where you two are sitting before, long ago as it was. It’s familiar territory.”

“Dad’s going to flip out,” Audrey says, biting down into her bottom lip. “He doesn’t—he just hasn’t had a good track record about stuff like this, you know? I’m shocked he’s handled everything as well as he has so far.” She cuts her eyes away, peering back into the creases of time since folded over. "It’s like sometimes I wonder how I ever made it out of high school alive.”

Rust leans back in his chair and reaches up to loosen his tie, watching as Orren rests his palm over Audrey’s hand to lightly squeeze her fingers. “Maybe it sounds unlikely,” he says, “but your dad’s done some changing for the better, kind of opened his eyes up to things he wasn’t so seeing so clearly before. I don’t think you need to worry much.”

Audrey doesn’t say anything, so he glances toward the restroom and follows the wait staff as they bustle to and from the kitchen. “Does Maggie know about all this yet?”

“Mom and Macie know,” Audrey says, quiet. “We told them last week.”

“How far along?”

“Almost three months now.”

Marty suddenly rounds the corner and starts heading for the table. Rust gives Audrey and Orren a wry ghost of a smile, one of the first candid ones he’s shared all night. “I’m not saying you need to tell him right now,” he says, “but you need to do it soon. Probably sometime before he catches on himself. Maybe after your cake, if you want to go ahead and enjoy it.”

“Y’all been trash talking me?” Marty asks half-jokingly when he sits back down and finds everybody silent.

“Whole time you were gone,” Rust says, pushing his wine glass aside to make room for their after-dinner coffee when the waiter arrives with dessert. He immediately wraps his hand around the white ceramic like a vice and pulls the brim close to his lips, taking a bitter mouthful off the top that burns all the way down to his core.

“Audrey and I had tiramisu on our first date,” Orren says with a lopsided grin, spearing a forkful and holding it out for her to taste. Her cheeks flush bright pink but she leans over and opens her mouth, letting her lips close over the fork before Orren pulls it away.

Marty clears his throat and cuts his eyes over to Rust, who looks for the most part like he just bit into a lemon. “You want me to feed you?” he asks, trying to keep his voice from cracking around the edges.

“Only if you want to draw back a bloody nub,” Rust mutters into his coffee.

“Well you’re still gonna try some of this,” Marty says, arming himself with a fork. He takes his own bite of salted caramel cake and slowly chews, rolling the rich flavor around in his mouth. “Shit, that’s good.”

He takes a few more bites before pushing a fork toward Rust. “I’m about to eat the whole damn thing. C’mon—just taste it.”

“Will you crawl out of my ass if I do?” Rust says. “Didn’t know this was a life or death situation.”

“Yeah, well I ain’t gonna eat the whole thing by myself and you could use a little sweetness in your life anyhow. Pretty sure I’ve only seen you voluntarily eat sugar about three times in twenty years.”

Marty pauses for a moment, knocking elbows with an old memory as it floods back into focus. “Come to think of it,” he says, “why in the hell did you ever have that five-pound bag of powdered sugar under your sink back in ’95?”

Rust doesn’t answer, just takes a forkful off the corner and brings it up to his mouth. As soon as the caramel hits his palette it’s a spark of crisp autumn sky across his tongue, yellow and umber-brushed scrubland shrouding the earth, the smell of flannel soaked in ocean air and tucking up as close as he could get to his pop’s lone space heater after a day spent out on the wharf. There’s not much happiness in the flavor but there’s bone-thawing warmth, a primal state of eclipsed contentment, and he can’t quite reign in the faint little moan that wells up in his chest as he sucks the frosting off the tines of the fork.

Orren and Audrey are busy looking at something on Orren’s phone but Marty sits stone-still in his chair, watching as Rust’s eyelids sink and the lines of his body visibly slacken and bow inward, gone soft like taffy left too long out in the sun.

When Rust goes in to take another bite he catches Marty’s gaze dragging hot over his mouth and down the contour of his throat as it bobs with another swallow. The man looks downright wrecked when the tip of Rust’s tongue slowly swipes along his bottom lip, licking a dab of salty-sweet from the corner of his mouth.

“Is the cake any good, dad?” Audrey suddenly asks, looking up as she takes another bite of tiramisu.

“Now that you mention it," Marty says, tearing his eyes away from Rust and trying not to squirm around in his chair, "I think I know what kind of cake I want for my birthday."  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Audrey still hasn’t broken the news even as they walk out into the parking lot after dinner.

Rust keeps an eye on her and Orren both, watching how they move under pressure, boiled back down to raw nerves held too close to the flame. Gunther saves face but keeps sliding restless hands in and out of his pockets in a poor attempt to keep them still, and if he had loose change there he’d be jingling like a goddamn Christmas sleigh. Audrey’s complexion looks waxen under the fluorescent streetlight and the hard set of her jaw tells Rust she’s been clenching her teeth around words that would rather be left unspoken.

“We’re gonna see y’all sometime again soon, yeah?” Marty asks as he and Rust walk the couple to Orren’s car. “Maybe you can drive down our way sometime so we can show Or here a thing or two about a real Louisiana crawfish boil. What you think, Rust?”

Rust stands on the outskirts of the bleeding pool of lamplight, zippo illuminating the planes of his face as he holds the flame to the end of a cigarette. He flicks the lighter shut and sucks down a drag deep enough to carve out the hollows of his cheeks. “That’d be fine,” he says, half-turning to blow the smoke away from them.

“I guess we’d need to bring the air mattress again,” Audrey says, giving Marty a watery look from beneath her lashes. She stalls for a moment, trying to gather up her words. “It’s kind of an uncomfortable setup for three, though.”

Marty reaches up to palm the back of his neck. “Well, I’ve been meaning to buy another bed for when— _what?”_ He stops short, and the night surrounding them suddenly rings sharp and loud. “What did you just say?”

A frail whisper of a laugh that sounds more like a gasp wrenches itself from Audrey’s lungs. “I’m pregnant,” she says, words falling heavy and thudding against the concrete. “Orren and I are going to have a baby.”

“Oh,” Marty says.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” Audrey rushes out all at once. “I just didn’t know how, and I knew you’d be less than—less than thrilled with the circumstances, to say the least.” The strength in her voice begins to ebb away, and she suddenly sounds small, caught back in the snare of something ten years gone.

Orren tries to touch her shoulder but she shrugs him off to stand her ground. “I didn’t want to ruin anything,” she says, tears welling up hot in her eyes. “Not when it felt like we were finally moving past how things used to be.”

Rust watches a mess of emotions rolodex across Marty’s face within the breadth of an instant, but the final expression the other man settles on splashes over his features like an aging bruise—brassy, an angry, overripe plum in color and sore to the touch, the one trophy Marty brought home to an empty house after charging reckless and headlong through the trenches of fatherhood.

Rust has always known regret when he sees it.

But now Marty doesn’t say a word, can’t, just reaches out and draws Audrey to him, tries his best to tuck her up underneath his chin and presses a kiss to the top of her head.

“Shh baby, you’re alright,” he murmurs, rubbing small circles over her back. “It’s alright. I ain’t mad—got no goddamn reason to be.”

They stand there together in the parking lot while Orren and Rust look on from the sidelines, one man with his eyes cast down toward his feet, unsure whether he’s allowed to watch something like this, the other taking one last drag on his cigarette and grinding the butt under his heel, tilting his head back to look up toward darkness peppered with stars.

When Audrey pulls her face away there are two black smudges on the shoulder of Marty’s dress shirt, something Rust will catch him silently contemplating in the laundry room later that night after they get home. She laughs once through her drying tears when Marty holds her out at arm’s length, one pair of matching blue eyes hesitantly meeting the other.

“Don’t you worry about a thing,” he says. “I’m the one who needs to be sorry, you hear? Not you. Never you.”

Rust has stepped around to extend a hand out to Orren, who looks a little more ragged than he did at the beginning of the night but quickly slides his bright smile back into place. “I’m thinking some congratulations are in order,” Rust says, clapping him once on the shoulder.

“Appreciate it, man,” Orren says, squeezing his hand tight.

They both ease up to Marty and Audrey, the latter of which gently pulls away from her father to embrace Rust. She circles her arms around his middle and lets her temple barely brush his shoulder. “You were right,” she murmurs just loud enough for him to hear, and he only hums deep in his chest in reply, smoothing a hand over her hair before letting her go.  
  


  
* * *  
  
  


After they part ways with a promise to meet up again sometime soon, Rust and Marty climb back on the highway that will lead them home to Lafayette. The interior of Marty’s Cadillac is silent for a few miles, lit with the soft blue glow of the radio display and dashboard dials. Rust keeps his eyes trained on the road ahead as he drives, giving Marty ample room to watch the blue-black night whir past as he sits in thought.

Eventually Marty will turn to watch him, eyes cut down to slivers that could read as suspicion but are probably just a testament to four glasses of wine and the late hour. “How long did you know?” he asks.

Rust slows for a red light and lets his wrist hang over the steering wheel. “Figured it out about ten minutes after we got there. Not too long.”

“Long enough, asshole,” Marty says with no real heat. “Thinkin’ you’re gonna owe me some salted caramel cake for that one.”

The light turns green and Rust accelerates through the intersection before sliding his gaze over to Marty, watching as the passing streetlights ripple in flashing bars of gold across his face.

“That so?” he says, looking back to the road. “Guess that sounds pretty good to me.”  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lo and behold, here I am, casually returning from the ether to bring you this behemoth of an update--and to think this is only half! I'm terribly sorry for taking so long to get this posted, but I was busy with spring finals and then it was the very real struggle of getting back into rhythm after stalling out for three weeks. Like Audrey and Macie's visit in chapter 7, I feel this may be more of an experimental sort of thing, especially with the introduction of Orren and a more dialogue-heavy format. (Also, how do Rust and normal dinner outings???) In the next chapter I plan to bring Maggie and a throwback to the famously awkward stiff-armed dancing scene in for a visit, so stay tuned for some kind of True Detective wedding bonanza. 
> 
> Finally, a shout-out to letsgetthisoverwithalready for inspiring the dessert scene. In our heart of hearts salted caramel is Rust's one true confectionery weakness, and the temptation to include a brief mention was too hard to resist. :)


	12. little things

A little less than a week before the wedding finds Marty dragging Rust through the menswear section of a department store.

He has a waterfall of ties draped over his arm that he keeps holding up to different dress shirts, intermittently throwing an expectant look in Rust’s direction like he’s trying to coax out some paltry ounce of an opinion. That endeavor may as well have died on the table, because Rust has had his _let’s-all-walk-hand-in-hand-into-extinction_ face on all morning and chooses instead to morosely pick up a single prepackaged dress shirt before straying off to loiter around the sport coats.

Marty catches a glimpse of the bone-white shirt in Rust’s hand and bites down on the inside of his cheek hard enough that it stings. “You know,” he says, mouth pulled thin, “Audrey may’ve mentioned something about wanting the guests to wear ‘soft pastels.’ Easter weekend and all that business.”

The plastic wrapper crinkles in feeble protest as Rust reaches up to grip it with his other hand, features gone hard, and sometimes Marty wonders if the man wasn’t originally carved from cypress and willed into life.

“I don’t remember the wedding invitation specifying a color palette, Marty.”

“For Christ’s sake—you can’t wear stark white to a wedding.”

Rust lets out a croaking huff of a laugh but his features don’t quite soften. “You worried I’m going to upstage the bride? Last I checked that rule only applied to guests of the female persuasion.”

Visions of scarlet blooming out over white cotton crowd around Marty’s mind and he can almost smell the wet tinge of copper warming in the air, feels the heavy taste of something sharp-edged and metallic coagulating in the back of his throat. He half-remembers briefly coming to his senses during the airlift to Lafayette General and watching dried blood chafe off his hands like flakes of rust, and even now the fucked-up irony of all that—rust on his hands, _Rust_ on his hands—is strong enough to make bile roll hot in his gut.

Marty draws in a tight wisp of a breath, can’t quite look Rust in the eye. “Yeah, well maybe I just think you look nice in some color, how about that?” He pauses for a moment, faltering. “Listen man, the white—I don’t know. It gives me the creeps.”

Some of the fight finally drains out of Rust’s face and he glances down at the shirt in his hands, seems to stare at it for a small eternity before moving to place the package back on the display table. When he turns back around he’s got his fingers hitched up high on his hips but his tone is a little softer than before. “What color are you thinking, then? If you touch something pink I’ll break your fucking hand.”

Marty screws his mouth up into a lopsided grin and cuts his eyes over to a mannequin set up behind them. “How about that bright yellow one over there?”

Rust turns away in a poor attempt to disguise that he’s about a hair’s breadth away from cracking a smile. “Fuck you, man.”

Eventually Marty settles on a light blue and silver arrangement for himself, but Rust remains caught between soft green and pale purple, of all fucking things, standing there with his brows drawn together like he’s trying to soak in and absorb the infinitesimal molecules of each color into his body.

“Never thought I’d see you take a shine to purple, but it don’t look half bad.” Marty marinates in the scene for a few moments before blinking as if rising up from a pool of water. “Good Lord, had somebody told me fifteen years ago that we’d be here doing this right now I probably would’ve had them committed.”

Rust abandons his pensive look to gaze at the other man from beneath lazy lids. “As opposed to us living together and sleeping in the same bed?”

Marty’s voice drops down to a lower pitch. “Hush your fuckin’ mouth, you know what I meant.”

“Will you just tell me which one of these goddamn things to get?” Rust says, looking like he’s about to split out of his own skin. “I never used to worry about shit like this. It was all a simplified process—get in and get out.”

“Only on account of you being one of them types who buys the same thing in eight different colors,” Marty says. “A little variety won’t kill you. Now hold them up to your face for a second so I can see.”

Rust bristles. “Do I look like a fucking five-year-old to you, Marty?”

“No, but you’re sure cutting up like one. Christ, just lemme see.”

He tries not to laugh at the sight of Rust’s incensed expression peering out from between two pressed shirts. “The green, I reckon,” he says after a moment, clearing his throat. “It, uh—it brings out the color of your eyes.”

“Well aren’t you just a peach,” Rust says, though he hooks the purple shirt back on the rack and stalks toward the register without further ado. “Green it is. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”  
  


* * *  
  
  


The day before they drive to Baton Rouge for the rehearsal, Marty jolts halfway up in bed just before first light stretches out, lurching headlong out of a lulled haze.

_“Fuck!”_

“We gettin’ robbed?” Rust mumbles, voice rough with sleep even though Marty knows he’s already got a hand halfway to the gun he keeps tucked between the mattress and bedside table.

Marty sags back against his pillow and rakes a hand over his face. “Shit, no— _no._ Damn it, sorry.”

“You having a bad dream?”

“What, were you planning on shooting it if I was?”

Rust’s reply comes after a few beats, clearer and more awake now. “Worked before, didn’t it?”

A choked noise rattles in the back of Marty’s throat. “Put your gun away unless you’re gonna shoot my dumb ass, ‘cause I’ve gone and forgotten to get Audrey and Orren’s wedding present.”

Rust shifts around to lie on his back, one hand resting over the ugly scar on his stomach, the other tucked under the pillow behind his head. Just enough of the covers are pulled up over his waist to keep him decent. “Thought you ordered it last week.”

Marty’s eyes briefly flicker over the thatch of dark hair peeking out from beneath the sheet, still never sure if he’s allowed to look at things like this. “It was in my online shopping cart thing but I hadn’t pulled the trigger yet,” he says. “Couldn’t quite decide on the specifics I wanted. Then we got wrapped up in that Llewellyn case and it flew right out of my head.”

“So overnight it.”

“Can’t,” Marty sighs. “Takes three fuckin’ days to process.”

“In such case,” Rust says, “you got the whole day to figure something else out. If worse comes to worst you can slap a bow on a bottle of good champagne and call it a draw.”

Marty rolls over to his side, mouth slightly ajar. “Audrey’s _pregnant_.”

“You don’t drink primo quality shit right away, Marty,” Rust says, bringing one hand up in a vague gesture before letting it drop against his chest. “I know I’m not the best example in the world but I figure there are still people out there who’ve got some amount of restraint. It can be some kind of anniversary shit, I don’t know.”

“Have you ever even been to a wedding?” Marty asks. “If the father of the bride shows up with nothing but a bottle of booze I imagine shit is gonna fly outright. Not to mention Maggie would probably flay me alive.”

Rust is following the fan as it spins in lazy circles, watching the blades flutter like dragonfly wings in the soft half-light before they shudder and dart across the room in streaks of shadow. He stays still for a moment, not moving outside the gentle rise and fall of his chest, and calmly closes his eyes against the vision.

“Last wedding I really remember going to was my own,” he says. “Wore a button-down to the courthouse and took Claire out for barbecue afterwards.” He swallows once and reopens his eyes. “She was about two months pregnant with Sophia, then. Got sick when she smelled the egg salad and I had to take her home.”

Marty props himself up on one elbow and watches as the cat jumps on the bed, deftly picking around the comforter until she’s settled down in the space between their thighs. “Who were your two witnesses?” he asks. Careful. Testing the waters.

“Cousin of Claire’s and good ole’ Morales,” Rust says, easy enough. “He and I went back even before we ran narco, met when I first joined the local force.” He shifts in the bed, drawing one knee up at a low angle. “He’d never say, but I still reckon a big part of the reason he signed on to be my handler is because he was hell-bent on keeping me from diving headlong into the fire.”

“He still around?”

Rust reaches down to scratch around Ghost’s ears, letting her butt her head into the palm of his hand as she purrs. “Could be, but I haven’t connected with him in years.” He makes a little _tsk_ sound that almost sounds fond. “Tony motherfuckin’ Morales.”

“You should try and look him up sometime,” Marty says. “See if he’s still kicking around out there.”

Rust’s eyes swing around to lock on Marty’s. “Why?”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, Marty,” Rust says. “Probably because historically, whenever me and Morales get together to talk I’m blown out of my fucking mind on coke and living on nothing but cigarettes and a death wish.”

Rust sounds casual enough when he says it but the words still get a hand up somewhere in the soft spot under Marty’s ribs and dig their fingers in like they’re aiming to bruise. “Yeah, but those days are long gone,” he says. “All that—it was all part of the job. You’ve moved on.”

“Doesn’t mean I need to go knocking down his door out of the blue.” Rust sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bed, showing off the long curve of his back. Ghost stands and walks over to him, rubbing against his side and curling her tail in a lazy hook around his ribcage. A whisper of a sigh falls from Rust’s mouth and dissolves before it can sink into the carpet.

“Morales is tied to a lot of fucked up things I don’t care to revisit in person,” he says. “He was the first one there—” He stops short, tilts his head back to stare at some high point on the wall. “He was the first one on the scene when…when Sophia. When the accident happened, you know.”

Marty watches Rust draw in a breath that makes his sides billow out, skin straining tight around the fine outlines of his ribs.

“And then along came Crash and four years of wading through shit up to our eyeballs,” he says. “I don’t need to commiserate over any of that. We were both there.” He tries to laugh but the sound comes out like a choked engine cough. “Fuck, man. Morales needs a call from me like he a needs a fucking hole in the head.”

He stands from the mattress, naked as a jailbird, and pulls on a pair of sweatpants before padding down the hall without another word on the matter. Ghost moves to hunker down in the warm spot left by his pillow and Marty reaches out to run a thumb along the ridge of her back, rolling around the past few minutes of material in his mind. He tries to arrange and sort everything out by meaning, bending the words into chain links like they can somehow pull a lifetime’s worth of loose ends together.

Truth be told, some part of him has come to revere these moments, the times when Rust throws him minute morsels of truth like stale breadcrumbs, little rough-edged pieces of a puzzle he could solve for a thousand years and never get quite right. All this time, all this shit strung out between them, and it’s like he’s been painting a portrait of a man with colors he couldn’t quite see, waiting the better part of a decade to soak up enough pigment to render a single freckle or an eyelash. Slow going all in all, and he knows he won’t ever figure Rust out, but maybe he’ll catch hold of enough to get down a recognizable shadow, a familiar image pitched through a plane of dark, murky glass.

And if he could manage that much, he’d be goddamn lucky.

When the coffee pot starts brewing Rust’s voice suddenly drifts back down the hall. “Best get going while it’s still early yet,” he says. “Looks like you’ve got some shopping to do.”

“I’m comin’,” Marty says, rolling out of bed to the sound of his knees popping. He fishes a pen out of the bedside table and scrawls two words on the corner of a nearby _Men’s Health_ , quietly stowing the magazine in his office desk before walking back down the hall to the bathroom.

“What’s your game plan?” Rust asks when he slides onto one of the stools behind the bar a few minutes later. He rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes while Rust pours him a cup of coffee, then reaches for his stash of vitamins sitting next to the landline.

Marty dumps a fish oil capsule and a multivitamin into his hand and stares at them for a few moments, only vaguely listening to Rust bang around in search of a skillet, before rolling them across his palm until they fall between his fingers and skitter across the counter.

Rust stands with his back to the stove, coffee cup brought halfway to his mouth. “I know that fish oil’s some nasty shit, man, but you’re making a mess.”

“Not gonna have to do much shopping today,” Marty says, holding up his hand to peer at Rust between the fan of his spread fingers. “Most of what I need, I’ve already got.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Marty manages to keep his shit together until they pull into the parking lot of the rehearsal dinner venue.

“Listen man,” he tells Rust, still sitting buckled into the driver’s seat of the Cadillac with his hands braced around the steering wheel, “I’ve never really met _met_ Maggie’s husband before, so how in the fuck are we supposed to sit and make polite small talk for the next two days? Then there’s the small issue where the extended family is fixin’ to find out I’m playing house with another dude.” He lets go of the steering wheel to press a thumb and forefinger to his temples. “Oh hell, if they haven’t been clued in already.”

“Well let’s hope it’s the latter,” Rust says, squinting out the windshield to watch people meander inside. “I figure I’ve always felt more comfortable getting quietly judged from a distance.”

“There is not enough liquor in the lower 48 to get me through this weekend,” Marty says. “You’re gonna have to wheel me home on a stretcher by the time all’s said and done.”

“Funny you say that,” Rust says, reaching for his cigarette carton in the center console before withdrawing his hand, momentarily thinking better of it. He opens his door and pushes it out into the cool afternoon air. “Here I thought you’d be the one nursing me back to health.”

“We’re fucked, is what we are,” Marty says, unbuckling his seatbelt and stepping out onto the pavement. “Fucked royal.”

He turns on his heel and peers over the roof of the car at Rust, now busy appraising something off in the distance, and revels in how familiar the timeworn sight is. Even now his cheekbones are still honed sharp enough to cut shadow and his greying hair curls up in the barest hint of a wave, though he often pushes it back in favor of parting it on the side these days, never quite indulging Marty in _that preacher’s son thing you had going on back in the day_. He’s got on a pale blue shirt with the sleeves rolled down and buttoned over his forearms, but his tie is forever too loose around the neck, top collar button popped open to showcase the delicate dip at the base of his throat. The same little hollow that—as Marty has come to find out, when somebody decides to dip the flat of their tongue into—makes Rust moan dirty and buck his hips up like a hot-blooded show pony.

Rust turns back around and jambs his car door shut, the sound of which breaks Marty out of whatever he’d been sinking into. “Good thing we’ve been fucked before,” he says, three cues too late.

“It’s a damn good thing,” Marty sighs, meeting him around back of the car to walk inside. He locks the Cadillac and slips the keys into his pocket, and then the weight of Rust’s hand settles light on the small of his back, only pulling away just before they make it to the glass doors.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Macie’s voice slaps into them like a brick wall as soon as they hit the air conditioned lobby.

“Hey Dad—Rust—over here!” she calls out, beckoning them over to a white pillar guarding the entrance to the dining room. She has a glass of wine in one hand with the other hooked around the muscular forearm of a young man who stands about three inches above Rust and Marty’s line of sight. His skin is like coffee with a good helping of cream, eyes a golden shade of brown reminiscent of daylight filtered through a tumbler of oak-aged whiskey.

When Marty somewhat guardedly confirms that their drive went smoothly enough, Macie beams and introduces the man on her arm, the waver in her voice only there if you were keen on looking for it. “This is my boyfriend, Raleigh Van Beveren,” she says. “We’re both in the grad program at school.”

“How do you do,” Raleigh says with an easy nod of his head, enveloping Marty’s hand in a warm grip before extending the same to Rust.

“That a Dutch name?” Marty asks, stepping back to get a better angle on the couple. Even with Macie in heels Van Beveren towers nearly a foot above her.

Raleigh lets out a quiet laugh, like he’s a man resigned to hearing this a thousand times and beyond. “It is. My father is originally from the Netherlands but my mother was born and raised in New Orleans,” he says, accent lapsing into a familiar silver-lined brogue around _New-Awlins_. “I grew up in Texas myself, but we root Saints for life.”

“Damn straight,” Marty says with a laugh. “You and Rust here are both honorable Texas transplants, then.” He briefly looks around before breaking into a half-assed stage whisper. “Honorable on account of you knowing good southern culture and not being some kind of Yankee doodle, you know what I mean?”

“Stop that, Dad,” Macie groans, though her face look freshly washed over with something like palpable relief. “You’re going to get yourself in trouble.”

“That’s why I brought Rust along,” Marty jokes. “If it comes down to a brawl, he can scare them off with one of his speeches about scented mea—”

“Marty?” a familiar voice is suddenly calling out. And then, “Rust—my God, is that you?”

Rust turns and lays eyes on Maggie Hart for the first time in a year. She hasn’t been Hart for a decade now but the two words seem inextricably linked somehow, roll off the tongue in three short syllables that have the audacity to sound better together than apart. He resolves to crack the single syllable off the end and think of her only as Maggie, Maggie, _Maggie—_ new surname be forgotten and damned—, because Maggie Hart resonates as cerulean and dryer-spun cotton and white daisies two days before dying, but Maggie alone is paper lace, fresh mint and orange blossom honey, the deep lavender haze strewn out across the sky at summertime dusk.

“Maggie,” he says, meeting her eyes this time without a bar thrown up like a barrier between them. There’s a moment where he thinks she may reach out to take his hand but she smoothes her palms over her hips instead, blinking as if to reconcile the man before her with a barroom snapshot taken the year before.

“You look good,” she says. “I was worried after—after what happened last summer. I’m glad to see you’re doing well.”

“Appreciate that,” Rust says. “Been doing a lot better.”

He’s perfectly content to let the conversation die there and walk straight to the bar, but Marty swoops back in to pick up the slack, carefully edging around safe topics and salutations that may as well fall from his lips gift-wrapped in plastic. Maggie smiles and nods at the appropriate intervals but looks like she’s taken keener interest in how closely inside Rust’s realm of personal space Marty is standing than anything that’s coming out of his mouth.

“Oh, you haven’t met Ted yet,” she says abruptly, turning to wave over a square-shouldered man from the bar. He ambles over with a glass of scotch, showing off the constellation of freckles splashed over his arms and hands as he moves to greet Rust at Maggie’s introduction. “Ted—this is Rust Cohle.”

“Ted Sawyer,” he says. “It’s a pleasure.”

“Likewise,” Rust hears himself say, and the word tastes like rubber in his mouth.

Marty’s hands have disappeared into his pockets but a tight smile briefly flickers across his features. “Howdy there, Ted. Been a while.”

“How’s the PI firm holding up?” Ted asks, stepping in place behind Maggie so her shoulder brushes his chest.

“We stay pretty busy,” Marty says. “It’s a couple notches down from CID and vigilante shit but it pays the bills, gives people some peace of mind. Rust here’s my partner these days.”

“So we’ve heard,” Ted says, taking a sip of his scotch.

Marty opens his mouth to address that somehow, isn’t even sure what he’d fucking say, but Audrey walks in with Orren at that moment and lets him off the hook because all eyes instantly swerve to lock on her.

The sight crashes into Marty like a freight train and he wonders how he’s going to make it out of this alive, because the wedding is still a day away and he already can’t quite speak, can’t really see through the damp heat burning hot behind his eyes. But then Rust’s putting it into words somehow, blinking a little faster than normal himself and murmuring, “Look at that, Marty. God damn if she isn’t glowing.”

Audrey is dressed in pale blue for the rehearsal, the fabric of her dress draping soft over the swell of her belly. Her hair falls in loose waves around her shoulders, eyes bright and skin flushing radiant in the afternoon light coming in through the glass ceiling of the atrium. She lets Orren guide her through the room as people part and give way, coming to a halt once she’s standing in front of her parents.

“We made it,” she says, blowing out a breathy sigh through her smile. “Looks like the gang’s all here.”

Maggie’s the first one to find her voice. “You look beautiful, sweetheart,” she says, and doesn’t seem to be able to move on from there.

Audrey laughs and plucks absently at the front of her dress. “That’s good news, considering how I cried for twenty minutes before we left.”

“She thinks the blue makes her look like a whale,” Orren mutters, eyes glazed over in a thousand-yard stare.

“Prettiest damn whale I ever saw,” Marty says a little hoarsely, earning him a slap on the arm from Macie. He clears his throat and leans in to kiss his daughter’s cheek. “Speaking of blue, y’all gonna tell us if it’s a boy or a girl yet?”

“That’s a secret for now,” Audrey says with a smile, turning to lead the way toward the dining room. “Now let’s get this thing rolling, if I don’t eat soon I’m going to chew my own arm off.”

Maggie and Ted fall into step behind her and drift off, Macie linking arms with Raleigh and following soon after.

When most of the atrium has cleared out, Marty gently knocks his elbow into Rust’s. “Bar’s still open,” he says. “What’ll it be?”

“Something strong,” Rust says, eyes verging on that wild look. “Anything.”

“Good,” Marty says, sucking in a shallow breath. “Cause I was thinking the same.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


That night after the rehearsal, Rust and Marty drive along the main drag and eventually make camp in a hotel room on the borderland between uptown and suburban Baton Rouge. Marty hangs their suits up in the closet before sprawling out across the bed, stripped down to his undershirt and slacks. He’s flipping between channels on the TV when Rust emerges from the bathroom in a cloud of steam with nothing but a towel wadded up at his front. He strolls across the room and crouches down on his haunches to dig around in his suitcase, bare ass shining.

“Now what if I’d still had the curtains open?” Marty asks, tossing the remote aside like he’s making some kind of point. “I don’t know why you insist on walking around naked all the time. If you weren’t wound tighter than a nun’s asshole I’d think you got off on it somehow.”

“Never had any real use for pajamas,” Rust says, straightening back up. His body still faces the wall but he turns his head to the side, corner of his mouth twitching. “Besides, thought you might enjoy the show.”

“Yeah,” Marty huffs, glancing back and forth between Rust and the television. “Well.”

Rust throws his towel over the bathroom door and eases down on the bed at an angle, sliding over to Marty’s side until he’s propped up on one elbow by the other man’s thigh. Marty watches him like a hawk as he reaches out and undoes his belt buckle, then jimmies a little maneuver with his hand that pops the button on his slacks open.

“What’re you doing?” Marty asks, trying to temper the gravel in his voice.

“Change of scenery, suddenly you’re gonna clam up on me?” Rust says, getting warm fingers down under the waistband of Marty’s boxer briefs and pulling. “The fuck does it look like I’m doing?”

He gropes around for a moment and—satisfied that things are headed in the right direction—draws up on his knees, bending low to take Marty in his mouth like he’s knelt down in prayer.

“Oh _fuck_ , Rust—your goddamn mouth,” Marty groans, only half-embarrassed that he’s already this wrecked and shaking. He gets a hand around the back of Rust’s neck but doesn’t force him, just lets it rest there warm and heavy and tries not to bite through his lip when Rust swallows him down.

Afterwards Rust rinses his mouth out in the bathroom sink and stretches back out across the bed, eyelids drawn low with the pretense of fatigue. “Who’s wound up tighter than a nun’s asshole, again?”

“Surely not me,” Marty mumbles, still in the state of disarray Rust left him in. “No clue what you’re talking about.”

He shucks his pants off and throws them on the floor, then twists around until he’s lying parallel to Rust, slides a hand down over the scarred plane of his stomach, down, down, and doesn’t stop until he hears that little telltale hitch stutter in his breath.

“Maybe there’s a benefit to you moonlighting as a nudist,” Marty says, working a twist into his technique on the upstroke. “Less clothes for me to deal with.”

Rust digs his fingers down into Marty’s shoulder, has got his face jammed up in the crook of his neck, blowing ragged puffs of hot air in the space between them.

“Quit talking, Marty,” he rasps out, and Marty does.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


As far as small victories go, Marty figures he did alright, only having to reach up and thumb at his eyes once as he walks Audrey down the aisle and gives her away to Orren Gunther. The fact that Rust has to loan him his pocket square during the vow exchange is immaterial, of course, because, “Who in their right mind could’ve torn their eyes away from the bride long enough to notice some old fogey mopping tears off his face, Rust? Only you.”

In reality, Rust watches Audrey from the edges of a far-flung memory, trying his damndest not to tip over backwards into old images that spark across his field of vision like a flicker show. Claire with her dark hair swept up messy on top of her head, Claire in a plain white and yellow sundress that he helps zip up before kissing the nape of her neck, Claire not showing yet but resting her hand over top of her stomach as if trying to feel the life stirring there, like she’s somehow making sure it’s still real.

Then Orren kisses the bride and the congregation cheers, and Rust vaguely wonders, standing there next to Marty, how different things would have turned out if Claire had gone through with the abortion and they’d never set foot on the courthouse steps.

Not that any of it matters. Not anymore.

Maggie’s eyes lock with his for a moment across the aisle—two wisps of blue smoke that are there one second and gone the next—, but then Marty is ushering him out the doors into the too-bright sun, clapping as Audrey and Orren pass by in a blur of ivory lace and grey seersucker, and Rust tries to remember why he never bothered to invest in a pair of sunglasses.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Rust lights up one cigarette after another on the way to the reception, blowing streams of smoke out the open window and using the empty soda can wedged between his thighs as an ashtray. He sucks each one down to the filter in about two draws, leaving long strips of ash hanging treacherous off the end.

Marty’s in high spirits but cuts his eyes away from the road when Rust starts in on number three.

“Maybe slow down there a little bit, cowboy, we’re gonna reek to high heaven.”

When Rust turns away from the window his eyes are glassy and bloodshot, look like they’ve sunk half an inch deeper back into his head. He drops a cigarette butt down into the soda can and clears his throat.

“You got everything together for Audrey?” he asks, quiet.

Marty glances back and forth between Rust and the road, a crease pulled tight between his eyebrows. “Yeah, you were there when I wrapped it up—listen, what in the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Just making sure you had everything you needed,” Rust says, making a detailed study of the floorboard. “It’s—it’s important that she knows, Marty.”

Marty gnaws on the inside of his cheek, bobs his head as he takes the turn that’ll lead them to the reception. Rust doesn’t light up another cigarette but traces the edge of his nail around the rim of the coke can, gaze thrown somewhere back out the windshield to watch the gradual fall of dusk.

“Yeah, I know,” Marty says when they pull into the parking lot, exhaling a sigh that wrings his lungs out like wet rags. “I know.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Dinner goes over without a hitch, though Marty takes the liberty of cutting both himself and Rust off after two rounds of champagne, waving away any waiter who tries to refill their glasses with a polite smile. “No thanks,” he says, like he and Rust aren’t capable of functioning on something like four fingers of hooch and a six pack apiece. “We gotta drive home tonight, better stay dry.”

Rust grits his teeth around any mounting argument, because—much to Marty’s delight—one Great Aunt Ethel has taken up residence in the chair next to him and busied herself with prodding around his right arm with two gnarled fingers.

“Would you look at that,” she says, rouged lips drawn up into a concentrated pucker. “If that ain’t the damndest thing. Now I’ve seen some sailor ink in my day, son, but nothing quite like this hell bird you’ve got here. You a serviceman?”

Rust blinks at that, lets the tension in his shoulder ebb and slack off a bit. “I was,” he says. “’83 to ’84. Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada.”

“Figured as much,” Ethel says, patting his arm and settling back in her chair. “You’ve got that look about you—don’t know if any man who served during wartime can ever really shake it. Kinda hangs on you like an old spook.”

“I’ve heard that,” Rust says, mouth curving up into a wry trace of a smile as Marty snorts behind him.

“Well you take care, darlin’,” the old woman says, steadily rising from the table. “I gotta see what these kids put in the punch bowl, because whatever it is has plum near knocked Maggie’s mama on her ass.” Ethel shuffles a few feet away before turning back around, eyeballing Rust over the tops of her glasses.

“You be sure to keep Martin in line,” she says, shooting Marty a look. “He’s always been a real troublemaker far back as I can remember, probably rode more damn hussies than bulls back when he was on the rodeo circuit.”

“Is that so?” an amused voice says from behind Marty, who can only clasp a weak hand over his eyes as his face lights up and burns beet-red.

“Goodbye, Ethel,” he chokes out, dropping his hand to find Maggie perching in the vacant chair next to Rust, bare legs crossed at the knee. Ethel cackles to herself and hobbles away toward the punch bowl.

“I always liked your Great Aunt Ethel,” Maggie says, folding her hands in her lap. “She doesn’t waste any time with bullshit, does she?”

Before Marty can open his mouth, Maggie’s smiling and nodding over her shoulder toward the dance floor. “I don’t know if the DJ has it scheduled, but there’s traditionally a father-daughter dance at some point in the evening.”

“Oh shit,” Marty hisses, hoisting himself up out of his chair and making a beeline for the new bride.

Rust and Maggie sit in silence, watching as Marty murmurs something to the DJ when the next song ends before guiding a barefoot Audrey out onto the dance floor, ivory lace whispering around her ankles. The song starts up—some old country tune from about twenty years gone, give or take—and Rust only barely recognizes it, but Audrey’s face lights up when she hears it and Marty’s eyes look a little ragged around the edges but he grins like he’s fit to burst all the same.

“They used to dance to this when she was little,” Maggie says. “Marty would have Audrey stand on his shoes and he’d take her around the family room like that. She’d beg him to play the song two or three more times before we could put her to bed.”

“Neither one of them will ever forget that,” Rust says, dozily following the pair’s movements across the floor. They couldn’t fully reenact their old ritual if they tried—Audrey’s growing belly acts as a buffer between her and any dance partner, and she has to stifle a laugh every time Marty accidentally bumps into it.

“No,” Maggie says, “I guess not.” She makes as if to look at Rust but can only get so far as his hands laced over his abdomen. “It’s funny how the little things mean so much more in the long run.”

“Funny indeed,” Rust echoes, not giving much thought as to what she really means.

When the song ends Audrey raises up on her tiptoes to press a kiss to Marty’s cheek, letting him gently spin her around on the spot before drifting off back to Orren. Marty looks surprised to find Maggie still at the table when he comes back to check on Rust, but he doesn’t say anything, just eases back down into his chair and reaches up to loosen his tie.

Macie and Raleigh wander over, punch glasses in hand, and idly chat until a new song starts up, something fast with a thrumming banjo lick. Macie sets her drink down on the table and drums her fingers against the back of Rust’s chair, cheeks flushed rosy pink.

“Legend has it you’re a pretty good dancer, Rust,” she says. “What’s say you take me out for a spin?”

“Seems to me, legends aren’t anything but false composites of a hopeful mythos,” Rust says, sliding his hands over his thighs. “I can’t dance.”

“Bull _shit,_ ” Marty says. “You near about danced that poor girl to death that one time—what was her name? Jen?” He snorts. “I’ve seen guys look more at ease walking on hot coals, but you still turned it out. Swung her around like a damn rag doll.”

“Please?” Macie tries. “You can’t sit here all night, and Raleigh can take mom out if you’re gonna be bashful about it.”

Rust looks like he’s got a hunk of wood lodged his craw but Marty waves him off. “I sure as hell ain’t dancing with you,” he says, picking up his champagne glass and swirling around the few sips left in the bottom. “Go on. You’re not hurting my feelings any.”

“Will you have this dance?” Raleigh says to Maggie, extending his hand with an exaggerated bow.

Maggie laughs and lets him pull her up out of the chair. “Come on, Rust,” she says over her shoulder. "It won’t kill you.”

Rust climbs to his feet, slow and rigid, like he’s running on misaligned gears. “One song,” he tells Macie, and she lets out a little whoop and does a fist-pump on the spot.

They step out on the dance floor and fall in time with the music, and it takes Rust a minute to warm up but Macie’s a good partner, actually gets the one-up on him and starts taking the lead as they do some akimbo southern-fried version of the waltz around the other couples. Maggie and Raleigh do their best to keep up but have an uneven rhythm, laughing and falling out of sync as they try to mimic Rust linking elbows with Macie and spinning her round in a wide arc.

And then the DJ’s playing the next track, something with a watered-down pace, and before Rust knows what’s what Macie has gone off like a slingshot toward Raleigh and Maggie’s being passed off into his hands.

He catches her by the upper arms and holds her there, motionless, standing stone-still in a sea of vibration.

“Move, Rust,” Maggie says, soft like she’s talking to a spooked horse. She snakes one arm up around to rest on his shoulder, pressing her thumb into the palm of his hand as she wraps her fingers around his unyielding ones. “Let’s go.”

She takes a step and his body follows, bringing a stiff hand up to settle in the middle of her back.

“Where’s Ted?” Rust asks, and Maggie laughs under her breath.

“Ted’s clueless, if that’s what you’re worried about. Believe it or not, he’s actually hatched some kind of conspiracy theory that you and Marty were screwing twenty years ago.”

The frankness of that is enough to stoke a chuckle in Rust’s chest. “Shit,” he drawls out in one long syllable. “There ain’t nothing further from the truth.”

Maggie draws her eyes up to peer at his face and finds he’s following the spotlights, blinking as the warm amber surrounding them shifts and deepens into a balmy shade of pink.

“You know,” she says, “I’m glad for you and Marty. That you found one another—after everything.”

“You can spare me the greeting card,” Rust says. “Fuck-ups like me and Marty generally find one another when we’re stumbling around in the dark. It was inevitable.”

The song is slowly tapering off to a close but they keep swaying, quiet for a spell until Maggie speaks low and close against his ear. “I called after Marty brought you home from the hospital,” she says. “I don’t guess he ever said anything about it.”

Rust decides to indulge her. “Sure didn’t.”

“I was worried you’d rip those sutures out before you had to time to heal,” she says, not waiting for a cue to continue. “Told him he’d lost his goddamn mind.”

She flicks her gaze back up to his face, searching for his line of sight and still not finding it. “And then I told him to do himself a favor and not hurt you like he hurt me.”

Rust looks back down at her then, eyes obscured by the weight of his lashes. “What about how you hurt me?” he asks, barely audible over the music.

Maggie swallows against the memory welling up hot in her throat, against the coolness of a formica countertop under her spread hands, against whiskey breath warm on the back of her neck and going home to bury her best lace bra in the garbage.

She doesn’t say sorry again and Rust doesn’t need to hear it, but when the song comes to an end Maggie realizes that he’s relaxed his hand, finally brought his fingers down to wrap tight around hers.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Later in the evening Marty brings two parcels in from the car and rests them on the corner of the gift table, wrapped up in powder-blue paper and crooked bows he tied himself. Most of the other guests have already left their gifts and trickled off and away in search of home or hotel rooms, compliant enough with Audrey and Orren’s decision to open everything on their own time.

He’s moving to walk back into the reception room in search of Rust when Audrey walks in through the doorway, tired-eyed and still barefoot but smiling. Rust slowly drifts in behind her and goes about making his parting words for the night.

“Congratulations,” he tells her, offering up a genuine smile. “You looked beautiful today.”

“Thanks, Rust,” Audrey says, reaching up to loop her arms around his neck. “We’re gonna see you again before the baby gets here, right?”

“I’m sure Marty and I’ll be around,” he says when she lets go, holding his hand out to Marty palm-up for the car keys. “If you need anything at all, give us a shout.”

He nods once in farewell and then walks out the doors, leaving father and daughter standing next to a small mountain of wedding gifts.

“Rust said you wanted to show me something,” Audrey says, sitting down in a lobby chair. She brings her hand up to rest on her stomach, sinking back into the cushioned material with a soft sigh.

“Did he, now?” Marty says, palming the back of his neck. “Well, I mean—I was just puttin’ your gift here before we left, but you don’t need to open it right now. Got something for Orren, too, but I know y’all didn’t want to make a big fuss about opening them tonight.”

“I can open it now,” Audrey says, eyes roving over the gifts. “Which one is from you?”

Marty picks up the smaller of the two blue boxes and turns it around in his hands a few times before holding it out to her. “Didn’t get as much time as I’d have liked to work on it,” he says, scratching at a nonexistent itch on his cheek as Audrey pulls the ribbon way. “Could’ve been a little neater, I guess.”

The paper comes off and Audrey holds a large scrapbook in her hands, covered in deep maroon fabric embossed with gold scrolling. She sets the book down in her lap and runs two fingers over the cover, then opens up to the first page. There’s a crude child’s drawing pasted inside, something rendered in green crayon that could be either a large flower or a surreal portrait of Big Bird.

“What’s this?” Audrey asks, and then notices the crooked block lettering in the corner of the photo: **_A_** _U_ _ **d** **R    e** _ Y

“Something you drew for me when you were pushing five or so,” Marty says, laughing softly. “Still not sure what the hell it’s supposed to be.”

Audrey flips through the next few pages, thumbing the corners of more forgotten drawings scrawled on paper and restaurant napkins. There’s a yellowed dance recital pamphlet, a dog-eared photo from a Disney World vacation taken in 1996, a graduation announcement, and a newspaper clipping from the year before picturing a present-day Audrey standing in front of her pieces at the gallery exhibition.

“You kept all this?” she says, voice hardly more than a whisper.

“Yeah,” Marty breathes out. “I wish there was more—didn’t have enough to fill up the book all the way, but I figure you could add things of your own if you wanted to.”

Audrey flips back to the front of the book and stops when she lands on the dedication page. There are only a handful of words there scrawled in Marty’s boxy print, but when she looks back up her bottom lip is caught between her teeth, tears streaking her cheeks.

“I love it,” she says, scrubbing around her eyes. “Thanks, dad.”

It takes a minute before Marty can find his voice to speak. “It ain’t much,” he says, clearing his throat. “Maybe just enough to show I was paying attention.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


When Marty walks out into the fallen drape of night he finds Rust leaning against the Cadillac, ankles crossed with a cigarette between his teeth. Cicadas buzz all around in the surrounding trees, so loud they almost drown out the traffic coming in off the highway.

There aren’t many streetlamps lit and it’s verging on pitch-dark save for the moon, but Rust is wearing his heavy-eyed philosopher look, sucking down a Camel Blue like maybe it could clench its thighs around his head and cry out all the secrets of the universe.

“You good?” he asks when Marty walks up, flicking the butt onto the pavement. The long lines of his body are at ease, quieted down and lulled under the spell of nicotine, and it doesn’t take much effort for Marty to crowd him up against the car and slide a knee between his legs.

Rust tastes like smoke and salt and the ozone that hangs thick in the air on a warm night, and he keeps a heavy hand on Marty’s hip even after the other man pulls back, lips still parted like he’s posed in thought.

“I’m good,” Marty says, sliding a hand down Rust’s chest before breaking away. “Now let’s get on home.”  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, here it is. Nearly 8,000 words of I-don't-even-know-what-anymore. I've fought this installment tooth and nail for three weeks and don't feel completely sold on the final product, but this is probably as good as it's going to get for the time being. For the foreseeable future, I think I'm going to delve back into the basics and center more exclusively around Rust and Marty without such heavy use of secondary characters. Expect MUCH more concise updates in the future. I don't know what happened with this chapter, but I just got going and couldn't stop until I'd thrown everything in but the kitchen sink.
> 
> I also need to briefly call attention to Rust's undercover handler. Canon doesn't give us a name for this person, but conspirator circles roundabout the fandom have basically accepted teethwax's name for this guy--"Morales"--from "Senses" as fanon. Hope you don't mind the reference, teethwax. I couldn't think of any other name that felt as right. Your story has been a huge inspiration for so many!
> 
> And lastly, major thanks to everybody who's been incredibly supportive and patient in the meantime, because you are what keeps me going when the going gets tough. I am forever appreciative of all the comments, advice, and inspiration from my fellow fans and authors. Y'all are the best. :)


	13. television

Somehow, it still surprises Marty that Rust will actually sit and watch TV.

All those years working CID, he can’t remember if Rust ever actually had a television set in his apartment. There’d been an old radio, sure—and maybe he’d seen a couple battered cassette tapes peeking out of a box one time, not that he’d been digging around or anything—, but as far as television went, the first one he can remember Rust ever having on his person was an old piece of junk used to watch occult snuff tapes in the back of some fucked-up crime scene orgy of a storage unit.

Not to say he _never_ watched it in those days, because Marty can remember having Rust over for a few game barbecues when the Saints were playing, and then there’d been that one time where Laurie called Maggie and told her that she’d found him sitting sprawled out on her living room floor watching Looney Tunes reruns one Saturday morning in April, halfway through a pack of smokes by 8 AM and looking like he was ten miles down the hard road to hell.

And as far as Rust and Laurie went, that incident had been pretty close to the end of things. Marty isn’t sure what happened, not exactly, but he figures Laurie never did like folks smoking in the house.

Even still, the two had just never really added up somehow—Rust and television. Something like oil and water, cats and dogs, vision-plagued nihilists and flashing boxes of consumerist propaganda.

After they’d first split out of Lafayette General and crashed back at the house, there’d been times where it seemed like Rust slept for days and times where it seemed like he didn’t sleep at all, sitting up alone during the sprawling, soft-bruised hours of night. He’d wash down his pills without a complaint and then fight them to the bitter end, sitting there burning holes in the wall with his eyes until at long last he’d sag back against the sofa and knock the fuck out.

But during his waking hours, any time not spent smoking on the porch or taking spoonfuls of soup to appease Marty’s endless nursemaiding was burned out in front of the television.

That had been no big surprise—what the hell else was the man going to do, healing up after having his guts stirred and rearranged? The real kicker was how he’d sit there and watch anything. Everything. Flip through channels without discrimination, glassy-slick eyes reflecting the screen’s glow as he studied commercials like they were clues, like they damn well actually meant something.

Marty still watches him do it sometimes, noticing the little crease that’ll pull between Rust’s eyes when he sees something he doesn’t take stock in, how he always has to get up to go to the bathroom or walk an aimless circuit around the kitchen when that fucking car commercial where some greenhorn dad drives his baby girl around the block to get her to sleep starts up.

They’re watching something on the Discovery Channel one night—something about the ocean, with all these deep-saturated blues and moaning whale calls—when Rust calls Marty out on staring.

He doesn’t even look away from the television, just draws out one of those slow blinks, goes about carefully switching up his crossed ankles so as not to disturb the cat where she’s stretched out along the seam of his legs.

“You even been watching this shit?”

Marty blinks, looks back to the TV. “Yeah. Talkin’ about whales.”

“Reckon you must’ve picked that up with your ears, because you’ve been sitting there watching me since the last commercial.”

“I don’t know if it’s been that long,” Marty says, clearing his throat. “Just kinda funny how you get into it.”

Rust leans his neck back against the couch, cutting his eyes over to Marty. “Like you didn’t try to put your foot through the screen that time Ingram fumbled the ball?”

“That’s different and you damn well know it.” Marty snorts. “Don’t suppose I’d ever given any real thought to you being the type to sit down and watch some whale program about deep sea phone sex.”

Rust looks back to the TV, awash in the faint blue glow bleeding off the screen. “We’d see them up in Alaska sometimes,” he says. “Smart fuckers, the orcas especially. They have a peculiar conscience about them—like maybe something that people haven’t even tapped into yet.”

“That’s real rich, coming from somebody who used to think we’d be better off going extinct.”

Rust hums in his chest, and whether he’s conceding or dissenting Marty’s not really sure. “That was a long time ago, Marty,” he says, quieter than before.

One of the whales on the program lets out a low keen that seems like it travels straight through Rust, vibrating around his bones before breaking loose and sinking down into the couch. Marty pretends to not notice and stares at the screen until he can see blue burning behind closed lids.

“Did you ever have a TV set back when you lived in that apartment?” he asks when the show cuts to commercial. He's gotta know. It's one of those bizarre things that'll haunt him if he doesn't ask now, get a knuckle wedged in deep against his conscious and thump him one every time they sit down in front of the tube.

“Naw,” Rust answers after a spell, easy enough. “Figure I was too busy watching the impending dissolution of a rapidly decaying world around me.”

Marty is silent for a moment, studying the impassive planes of the other man’s face. “Forget I ever asked, Rust, I mean god damn—”

Rust laughs then, low and throaty. “I’m just fucking with you, man,” he says. “There was one in the upstairs bedroom.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not,” Rust says, getting up and brushing against Marty’s foot as he walks toward the kitchen to dig around for a couple beers. “How else you think I got that idea to ninja my ass into Tuttle’s place?”

“Keep on,” Marty says in heatless warning, shaking his head when Rust hands him a bottle. “You just keep right on.”

Rust sinks back down on the couch and takes a long pull off his beer. “I had a TV,” he says when the whale program starts back, kicking his feet up on the coffee table. “Just never bothered to plug it in.”  
  
  
  



	14. sticks and stones

The email shows up in Marty’s work inbox on a Friday morning. He scans over it once, clamps the inside of his cheek between his molars, checks the date and address again. Flicks his eyes over to the back room and smiles to himself, thinking.

Rust walks in from said back room with mugs of coffee and green tea in hand, some manila folder and his weatherworn ledger jammed up underneath his arm. He sets the tea in front of Marty and drops down into a chair, balancing the black book across his knees.

“You got that look like you’re trying to chew your own face off,” he says, swallowing a mouthful of coffee. “That fruitcake lady up your ass about the dog inheritance again?”

“Nope,” Marty says, sinking back in his office chair. “Actually, turns out we’ve been invited to a fundraiser as ‘special guests.’” He gives Rust a look over the tops of his reading glasses. “It’s, uh—well, it’s some kind of thing to help build shelters for battered women and children.”

Rust’s immediate reply is to draw out one of those painfully slow blinks, and Marty impulsively thinks about the little dances video game characters do while gearing up for a power surge.

“Sounds pretty fucking ironic, considering this state’s private agenda when it comes to women and children,” Rust says, mouth drawn into a rigid line. He abandons his mug on the edge of Marty’s desk and shakes his head. “God damn.”

“I’d have bet my last dollar on you saying that, but I still think we need to go.”

“What for? Two times in the paper, I’ve met my fucking quota,” Rust says, scoffing. “They’re using our names to make some kind of statement, Marty—saving face. Like we’re little finger puppets they can use to give credence to the cause.”

Marty pulls his reading glasses off his face and tosses them on the desktop. “Rust, the community—”

“Is still a flock of blind sheep being led by the nose by a wayward shepherd,” Rust says. “They don’t know what we know. They’re just extras dancing in act three of some fucked-up charade of a show where they screw themselves over in the end.” He underhand tosses his ledger to the floor. “Battered women and children. Jesus fuckin Christ.”

Marty scratches his thumb through the hair above his ear. “You go real hard on them similes and metaphors when you get worked up, don’t you?”

Rust laughs, high and brittle. “Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about, Marty.”

“I know what you’re talking about,” Marty says, “and I think you’re coming at it from the wrong angle. Is it kinda fucked up? Yeah, probably, considering everything we know—but how’s it gonna look if we don’t show up?”

“Like I’m telling the state to go and fuck right off, directly.”

Marty sighs. “Thought maybe you’d want to at least get a feel for the thing. You’re not the least bit curious?”

“Naw,” Rust says, gazing somewhere in the vicinity of Marty’s abandoned exercise bike, the likes of which has a potted fern—a gift from a client—hanging crooked off the handlebars. “They’ve been playing this hand for decades, Marty. Ain’t nothing left to wonder about.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I was lookin’ forward to seeing the look on one of our old pal’s faces when we roll up as honorary guests on his home turf.”

Rust cuts his eyes over to Marty’s, sharply curious. “Where’s it being held at?”

“You’re never gonna believe this,” Marty says with a lopsided sliver of a grin, “but it’s down in Iberia Parish.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Rust had counted on being pissed the fuck off the whole time he was here; he’d even been courteous enough to tip Marty off to this fact during the car ride over, two and a half cigarettes and seventeen miles outside Iberia. He hadn’t counted on feeling like he’d taken a two-ton wrecking ball straight to the chest.

Women and children and a few straggling men, some smiling, others not—all looking like they’d swallowed something cold and heavy a long time ago, absorbed it, tried to mask it with swilled sunshine and never quite managed—, come up to him and Marty throughout the afternoon, take their hands and touch their shoulders and say things like, _we saw y’all in the papers and on the TV, we saw what you did, thank you son, thank you._

Turns out some of them had family members dug up out of Childress’s front yard and hauled in from the rotting depths of Carcosa. They tell him so, like he knew he was bringing their families closure after five-ten-fifteen-twenty years of sitting in the dark, like they came here only to bow before him in thanks, and he doesn’t quite know what to say, lets Marty take the lead and dole out well-meaning sentiments like value pack greeting cards while he squeezes hands between his own and murmurs gentle monosyllables to people with haunted eyes who don’t know how far from a hero he truly is.

Later in the evening, there’s a little girl hitched up on her mama’s hip, near about three, maybe four. He clocks her from a few yards away and immediately prays to something—any fucking thing—that she doesn’t look his way, that they don’t come to him. And by God, that’s exactly what they do.

The little girl looks so much like his well-thumbed memories of Sophia, so damn close and real that he can feel his knees swaying under him like virgin cattails, and he has to grab fast onto Marty’s shoulder to keep from buckling there on the spot. Some part of that substance, that familiar _darkness_ runs like fluid into his mind and this isn’t Sophia, not his baby, not his girl, but it sure feels like he’s fallen face-first into an old ghost.

People don’t ever ask but here’s the answer: thirty years later and he’s still this fucked up, forever fucked up—fucked up going on what seems like eternity and counting.

“Rust?” Marty says, getting a steady hand on him, and the mother’s curiously wary but the little girl watches him with wide, hazel eyes while he blinks through it, tries to expel the wave of loss like he can cough it out.

“You alright?” the mother asks, and Rust nods, more or less composed, but doesn’t look back up at the little girl. Not again—not directly.

“He’s fine,” Marty says, laughing in that easy way of his, though he keeps an arm slung secure around Rust’s waist. “Been a long day in the sun—think maybe it’s time for a sit-down.”

“Get your fucking hands off me,” Rust hisses in Marty’s ear, which only succeeds in bringing a warm hand up to rest heavy against the back of his neck.

“What’s wrong with you?” Marty whispers, pressed flush up against Rust’s side like he’s hell-bent on anchoring him in terrestrial reality with nothing but his own body weight. If there’s such thing as circles of personal space between the two of them anymore, Rust reckons they probably only take up about half a slot together. “You seeing shit—having a vision or something?”

“Something,” Rust breathes out, giving up on a fight, and when Marty steers them around to find some shade they’re just about standing toe-to-toe with none other than Steve Geraci.

There’s a string of cotton-mouthed silence where they look and Steve looks back, and just when Rust figures he’s gonna throw fuck-all to the wind and ask about the car he last remembers resembling a slice of Swiss cheese, Steve’s breaking in with: “Well I’ll be damned, if it isn’t our honorable guests themselves.”

“Don’t mind us, Steve,” Marty says, breezing past Geraci as he leads Rust toward the tent canopy. “We were just on our way to the refreshment table, but I’m sure glad you made the trip out here to see us.”

There’s a thousand different things Rust expects to come out of Steve’s mouth, none of them too kind, but he stays silent and watches them go, not turning away even as Marty pushes Rust down into a chair and runs off to grab something cold.

Steve’s up and disappeared by the time Marty comes back with some water. Rust peers out over the grounds to try and spot him, but Marty’s urging him to chug down most of the bottle and by the time they finally, _finally_ crack open a few beers, the old sheriff’s completely slipped free of his mind.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


A bunch of the old boys are out in full force tonight, most come along on something more akin to departmental expectation than sheer good will to support the cause. CID and the like, all throwing their gun-laced weight around and laughing too-hard and too-loud to fit the spirit of the program. Marty slaps shoulders and clinks bottles with the best of them, reminiscing about the good ol’ days long since gone and falling right back into boots he left behind several years before with an ease that Rust has only ever been able to emulate with a few lines of fine Colombian and a bullet-eaten leather jacket.

He watches from the sidelines now, nursing another beer and calling out details to stories when Marty prompts him from a safe distance, having long since given up on trying to drag Rust into the inner circle. It’s getting on in the evening and most of the families have turned in after a long day of so-called fundraising, and now only the rowdy crowd remains in strong numbers, none too eager to head home just yet when there’s still free food and familiar company to be found.

Come back from the ether, Steve Geraci is lingering like a stout old badger around the edges of Rust’s vision, working steady on what must be his umpteenth beer. He occasionally throws beady-eyed looks in their direction, and Rust knows Marty must’ve seen him by now but he’s got a good enough buzz going that he could probably give a few fucks short of a full deck.

Heat’s trapped tight up under the tent canopy and weighs down on Rust like a wet blanket, so he climbs to his feet and walks out beneath the cooling swathe of night, sucking any faint shine coming off the few visible stars down deep into his lungs.

Somebody’s stoked up a small bonfire that the kids had sat around roasting hotdogs earlier, but the circle is vacant now and Rust eases down into one of the empty chairs left behind, trapping an empty bun bag up under the leg so it doesn’t blow away. The fire’s on its last limb but it’s still got some life yet, so he pulls out his cigarettes and trades the weak starshine for a few drags off a Camel Blue.

The night is quiet, most sound muffled and softened by dark velvet and cricket song, and when Rust goes to pinch off the butt of his cigarette a familiar voice breaks in from the right.

“Hear you and Hart are a couple of queers these days, Cohle.”

Rust keeps his eyes trained on the dying bonfire, idly fingering around the neck of his beer where it’s wedged between his thighs. “What business would it be of yours, Steve?”

“Could’ve guessed that you were fucking back in ’95,” Steve says, laughing to himself before spitting in the grass. “I always knew Marty kept you around for selfish reasons, but I figured he’d have used your candy ass up and thrown you out by now.”

Rust leans to one side and sets his beer on the ground, slowly sitting forward in his chair until his elbows are balanced on his knees. He doesn’t look directly at Steve, just stares off somewhere into the blue-black sprawl of dark. “Would’ve thought a couple sniper rounds in that dick pump you called a car might’ve finally taught you to quit mouthing off,” he says, tempered casual. “But maybe I need to bitch slap you again just for old time’s sake.”

Steve takes a few staggered steps forward. “If you so much as lay a finger on me,” he says, ruddy-faced and already breathing hard, “I will grind your ass down into the fucking dirt. Don’t you forget what county you’re in—you’re under my roof now, boy.”

“That so?” Rust says. He leans back to look around behind Steve, eyebrows slightly askew. “Be a shame to get your ass beat on your own turf, I reckon.”

Steve turns around to look behind him and finds Marty standing about two feet away, fingers tucked into his jean pockets. “Howdy there, Steve,” he says. “I’d started wondering where you’d gone off to jamb your thumb up your ass.”

There’s a halfhearted attempt on Steve’s behalf to swing at Marty, but before he can rear back far enough to let one fly Rust is up out of the chair like a switchblade with an elbow locked tight around his neck, one hand twisting his arm up between his shoulders until it threatens to crack.

“Funny how that trick works twice,” Marty says, chuckling and shaking his head. “Think you may have had a little too much to drink, Steve, ‘cause you sure ain’t thinking clearly. You figure you’re about done running your fucking mouth?”

“You cocksuckers can’t do a god damn thing,” Steve spits out, eyes rolling white in their sockets. “I got a slew of boys over yonder who’d sooner crack your fucking skul—”

Steve never quite manages to finish his thought, because at that moment Rust takes a punch to the kidney that sends them both headed fast for the dirt.

It takes Marty all of about two seconds to get a fistful of the perp’s shirt and land a hook on his jaw, and there’s no telling who called the cavalry but it comes down fast and it comes down hard.

As Rust drives his elbow back into somebody’s gut and watches Marty dodge another punch coming in courtesy of Geraci before cracking his fist into the other man’s nose, he has just enough presence of mind to think about how funny it would have seemed not too long ago, Marty here fighting for his honor rather than against it.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The on-duty officer who arrives at the scene—one Charley Dothan, new recruit pulled in from St. Mary—takes a look around and shakes his head like he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. “But Sheriff,” he says, hands braced up on his hips, “the woman who called in said y’all done whipped the hell out of the special guests _unprovoked_.”

Steve’s wiping at the tail-end of a bloody nose, slumped over in a plastic lawn chair. “Unprovoked my ass,” he slurs, swaying as he tries to get up. “They had it a long time coming. Motherfuckers done finally got theirs.”

Dothan scratches the back of his neck and calls over to the other officer in uniform, currently busy loading a guy in cuffs into the back of his squad car. “We gotta take him in, Gomez. He’s drunk off his ass.”

A few yards away, Rust and Marty are sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the dirt, mostly keeping one another propped upright as they watch the proceedings unfold by the light of red and blue police strobes. Marty’s shirt is caked with dirt and blood from the cut in his eyebrow and Rust is favoring his right wrist, tongue briefly darting out to run along the split in his bottom lip.

Steve catches sight of them again and draws back up to his full height, half-ready to charge, but Dothan braces a hand against his chest before he can move any further.

“Christ, will you come over here and get him so I can talk to these guys?” he says to Gomez. “Put him in the front seat for now, we don’t need folks blabbing any more than they probably already are.”

Gomez fetches Steve and guides him back to the squad car, keeping his mouth pinched into a thin line as Geraci spouts off a string of curses intertwined with a wide array of colorful insults. Rust and Marty stay silent until the car door slams and cuts his voice out from the thrumming scape of night.

“Good to know old rummy hasn’t changed much,” Rust says to Marty, vaguely watching as the young officer makes his way toward them.

“I recognize you two—Hart and Cohle, right?” Dothan says, squatting down until he’s at eye level with them. “But then again, I reckon everybody does ‘round these parts. That was some damn fine detective work y’all pulled last year.” His eyes rove over Rust and Marty’s injuries for a moment before he looks back up at them, a fold of creases bunched up across his forehead.

“Well,” he says, like he’s not quite sure, “do you think you can stand?” He straightens back up and extends a hand down to Marty, who needs a little more help than he’d care to admit with getting off the ground, grunting with his bones complaining the whole way up. He and Dothan get on either side of Rust and haul him to his feet, both careful not to jar his arm.

“That broken?” Marty asks, nodding towards Rust’s wrist as he picks some grass out of his hair, and Rust shakes his head, more in honest reply than in any real attempt to get Marty’s hands away from his head.

“Nah,” he says. “Could be sprained a bit, but I’d know if it was broken. Probably just needs some ice.”

“Y’all took a real good beating,” Dothan says, awkwardly apologetic. “Ladies who called in said they came at you, and seeing as how this isn’t the first time Boss Hogg’s gotten caught up in some shit I don’t see why we need to keep you waiting around. We’ll take Steve and the boys back to the station for a spell, maybe dump some of them off in the drunk tank for the night.”

Gomez walks back over with a clipboard in hand and pulls a pen from his shirt pocket. “You guys feel like making a statement before you go?”

   
  
  


Later, as Marty merges back onto the highway that’ll lead them home, he’ll look over at Rust and lightly clear his throat, eyeing the sharp-angled silhouette of the other man’s profile beneath passing street lights.

“What d’you reckon’s gonna come out of that report?” he asks, even though he thinks they both already know the answer.

Rust stares straight ahead out the windshield, blowing out the faintest whisper of a telling sigh. “There’s no telling.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


A few minutes short of one o’clock in the morning finds Rust sitting on the closed toilet lid at home, gritting his teeth as Marty dabs antiseptic on his split lip.

“You took an eight-inch hunting knife to the gut and you’re gonna sit there and whine about this?” Marty says, leaning back to admire the angry shade of overripe plum mottled over Rust’s cheekbone and eye socket. “God damn, that’s one hell of a shiner.”

“Like you don’t look like shit,” Rust says. “Good chance I may have to sew that eyebrow back together with fishing line.”

“You ain’t coming near me with any kind of needle,” Marty says, screwing up his face in the mirror with a tight wince. “Just a couple butterfly strips should do the trick, and if they don’t we can sue for plastic surgery money later.”

Rust stands up from the toilet and gestures for Marty to sit down in his place. “Let me see your hand,” he says, trying to be subtle about his own smarting wrist. Marty’s knuckles are bruised ugly and split clean in two places, and Rust holds his hand under the faucet, carefully cleaning away any dirt and dried blood before dabbing on some antiseptic and opening up a couple butterfly bandages.

“All this is your fuckin’ fault,” he tells Marty, smoothing the edges of the tape down between his fingers. “If you hadn’t gotten all hot to go over there and flaunt that ‘special guest’ bullshit in Geraci’s face we’d be a whole hell of a lot less fucked up right now.”

Marty flexes his hand once experimentally before tucking it down in his lap. “I thought we held our own pretty good, just the two of us.”

“We got our asses kicked,” Rust says, turning his attention to Marty’s eyebrow. He braces a hand against his face and turns him toward the light, trying to better gauge how deep the cut goes. “Shit, man—that’s gonna need stitches. You want to wait ‘til morning or am I doing it tonight?”

“Fuck,” Marty sighs, closing his eyes and leaning heavy into Rust’s hand. “Where’s my tackle box?”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Rust is lying in bed later, propped up against a couple pillows with an ice pack wrapped around his wrist. The TV’s turned on to some late-night movie channel, running through an old black-and-white, and Marty keeps dozing off and starting back awake every time they cut to commercial.

He reaches up at one point to feel around his newly-stitched eyebrow and Rust jabs him under the covers with his foot, making the cat get up and reposition herself closer to the headboard.

“Quit touching,” Rust mumbles. “If you mess it up I’m dragging your ass to Maggie’s.”

“Did a good job,” Marty says, yawning and flipping his pillow to the cold side before stretching out flat. “You’ve got good hands for fine work, somehow. Shoulda fuckin’ known, the way you nitpick details.”

“Mmm,” Rust vaguely hums, half-watching the television cast planes of light across the dark walls.

Marty stares up at the ceiling, expression washed over with something that looks sore to the touch. “You know,” he says, “I caught some of that shit Steve was saying to you. Not everything—but enough.”

“Sticks and stones, Marty,” Rust says, shifting his ice pack. “I’ve heard a lot worse.”

“You ever think of trying to put a label on all this?” Marty asks, raising two fingers from his chest in a gesture that seems to encompass the entire room. “What we’re doing here?”

“Not really,” Rust says. “Don’t see any real point in trying to box ourselves in. It is what it is.”

Marty turns over on his side, quietly hissing against the protest of hidden aches and pains. “And what is that?”

“I don’t know,” Rust says, peering down at Marty under the weight of his lashes. “It’s just what we’ve got.”  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah yes, good old Steve Geraci brought back for his final round like a bad Scooby Doo villain (I am so sorry). I always figure that the third time's the charm, so there was no way Rust was getting away scot-free if they ever butted heads again. Good excuse to showcase some bruised-up woobies, too, if I'm being completely honest. Priorities, you know.


	15. last hit

Ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning finds Rust and Marty sipping acrid drive-thru coffee in a 7-11 parking spot down in Crowley. Marty’s got a tasteful spread of pastry crumbs on his shirtfront and they’ve long since cranked the windows down in hopes of coaxing a paltry breeze inside, though Louisiana summer is already in full swing and the air slaps up against them like a wet sheet.

As Rust watches their mark step out of the passenger seat of a pickup and slip inside the convenience store, a bead of sweat gathers between his shoulder blades and slides down toward the small of his back. He shifts around in his seat to press back against the leather, a movement that Marty takes as his cue to start getting restless. They’ve been tracking this guy for just under a week and it was a vague tip-off about his morning beer run that’s finally brought them this close.

“Do we follow him to wherever he’s hunkered down or nab him here?” he muses, drumming his fingers in a rapid-fire tempo against the bottom part of the Cadillac’s steering wheel. “These guys who skip child support payments are so fucking flighty, man. Betting the farm, he’s gonna make a run for it no matter what. And who the fuck’s driving the truck?”

Rust flips through the file in his lap and peers at Ronald Whey’s photo. White male, middle-aged, probably just a few scant years younger than he and Marty but heavier-set and a couple inches shorter. He’s got some form of rosacea that makes him look like he’s always come off running a few miles under the high noon sun, and his ex-wife had made a strong point to let on that he was probably still pissing away his money on booze and redheaded hookers.

“He bolts on foot, we can catch him,” Rust says, closing the file and tossing it on the dash. “If we split off we can corral him in and meet somewhere in the middle. Better luck out here than somewhere residential where he can hole up with a friend. He won’t get far.”

“You sound mighty confident there, Rambo,” Marty says, watching the gas station door through the windshield. “You been training for some 5K I don’t know about? It’s been a hot minute since you did any sort of takedown on foot.”

Rust levels a look at Marty. “Are you more worried about me or yourself?”

Marty scratches around his chin like maybe he hadn’t thought of that before. “60/40 split, I reckon.”

There’s no time to hedge bets about who’s weighing down as more of a liability, because when the finger-smudged glass door next swings wide one Ronald Whey is walking back toward the truck with a plastic bag hanging on his wrist.

“I’m going,” Marty murmurs, stepping out of the Cadillac and easing the door shut. “Ronald Whey?” he asks, coming in at a wary but confident angle around the passenger side of the truck. “How you doing—name’s Marty Hart.”

Before Rust has even got his feet on the ground, it seems like Whey spots the echoing vestiges of Marty’s old cop swagger coming in from a mile away. The driver of the truck must have a similar idea, because they slam into reverse and squeal out of the lot before Whey can touch two fingers to the door. With the truck roaring off into traffic he rears back like a startled animal, wastes no time in slinging his bag full of beer at Marty like a mace, and promptly takes off like a shot.

“Motherfucker!” Marty hisses, dodging the broken bag of beer bottles and loping off after him. “God damn it, I’d knew he’d run—Rust! Rust, go around!”

“Follow him—I’ll try to swing around wide and push him back your way,” Rust yells, jumping the curb and tearing down the side alley.

Marty’s within a few good yards of Whey but he’s nowhere near as slow as Rust was betting—the fucker can move like a starving pig to the trough, and sprints full-tilt across a vacant lot before disappearing around the corner of a mattress store.

“Stop, Whey, we’re not police!” Marty bellows out when he rounds the mattress store. Whey charges ahead but has slowed up considerably to stuff a hand down the front of his pants, doing a fast-paced skipping hobble until he breaks into the parking lot and comes up with something clenched tight in his fist.

Rust has finally swung into view from the right, swooping out from behind a barber shop like some kind of stone-faced falcon, and is pumping his knees harder than any man who smokes something like two packs a day has any right to be.

They follow hot on Whey’s heels as he barrels down an alley between two free-standing brick buildings, and as he whips around another corner he underhand tosses the small parcel in his hand up into the air, the likes of which Rust and Marty watch soar through the buttery morning light before coming in for a landing on the edge of an overhanging roof.

“Go, go!” Rust urges as Whey takes off across another parking lot, but Marty’s legs are starting to err on feeling numb and his lungs constrict and hitch up tight inside his chest, seeming to grow smaller by the second. He keeps pace with Rust until he notices the other man begin to lose steam as well, and then it’s like they’ve hit a wall, slowly tapering off until they’re bent at the waist in the middle of the half-empty parking lot, watching as Ronald Whey scurries off and disappears in the distance.

“Oh we’ll catch him all right,” Marty wheezes, hands braced against his knees. “He won’t get far, will he, Rust?”

“Statistically speaking, no,” Rust says, palms flattened on top of his head. He leans over to spit on the concrete and sucks in a lungful of air. “How was I supposed to gauge that a guy like that could run as fast as he does? Motherfucker’s got legs like tree trunks.”

“I’m getting a fucking Taser,” Marty answers by way of reply. “Addams still owes me and I’m getting a Taser. I’m too fucking old for this bounty hunter shit.”

“Maybe I should cut it down to one pack a day,” Rust says, squinting at some point in the middle-distance, and Marty barks out a laugh that sags weak in the middle.

“You’d really start trying to give it up after all these years?” he asks, turning to make the trek back to the car. “For a long time I used to think nicotine was the only thing keeping you alive, like there had to have been some magical nutrients in that shit they weren’t letting on about.”

Rust tosses him some kind of glaring look that Marty waves off with a snort. “Better late than never, I guess.”

“Hold on,” Rust says when they break back into the alley. “Where’d that bag end up, the one Whey pitched up on the roof?”

Marty tips his head back to scan the overhang. “Somewhere over here on the left. Landed pretty close to the edge—oh shit, right there it is.”

“Think you can give me a boost?” Rust asks, eyeballing the bag where it rests a few meager inches from the rain gutter. “Just one leg up so I can grab it.”

Marty nods and walks over to brace himself, lacing his fingers in a stirrup for Rust to step into. “On three,” he says, waiting for Rust to get a hand steadied against his shoulder. “One, two—”

Lift, one quick snatch, a surprisingly agile touchdown, and both men are left to stare down at a clear plastic baggie the size of a large egg nestled in Rust’s palm.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Marty asks, peering over his shoulders at either end of the alleyway.

Rust stuffs the bag down into his pocket and presses his hand against the bump to help flatten it out. “Thinking I’ll start cutting back on the smoking tomorrow,” he says, giving Marty the barest brush of a wink. “C’mon, you left the car unlocked with the windows down.”  
  


* * *  
  


After they close up shop at the firm and call it a night, Marty stops at some hoodoo new-age spiritual joint with a curtain of beads hanging in the doorway and waits in the parking lot. Figures whatever paraphernalia they might need, Rust is bound to find it in there, and him tagging along inside like the chain-rattling ghost of Suburban Dads Past wouldn’t do anything but make the hippie kids kick all the good shit under the rug anyhow.

Marty untucks his dress shirt and leans up against the ticking warmth of the car hood, watching the sun slip down beneath the lip of a cooling asphalt horizon. He hasn’t taken a hit off a joint in something like twenty-five years and the prospect makes him feel a little giddy now, a little invigorated, where the thrill of doing something he shouldn’t is so fucking familiar, a second nature left to gather dust that hasn’t resonated potent like this in a good long while. A current of excitement thrums under his skin, and when Rust walks back into the settling twilight—clad from the waist up in only his white undershirt, sleepy eyes, and a brown paper bag—his stomach flutters up into his ribcage like a spring-drunk starling.

“Find what you needed?” he asks after they buckle into the car, cranking over the ignition.

Rust sets the bag down between his feet and nods, fanning his fingers out as he slides his hands over his thighs. “Just some good rolling paper and a book of matches, nothing highfalutin.”

“Old school, I can dig it,” Marty says, laughing as he turns into the flow of traffic, and Rust cuts a look at him from the corner of his eye.

“Don’t tell me you’re gonna try and turn on some reggae shit, pull a lava lamp and bongos down out of the closet or something,” he says. “We roll this shit, we’re gonna smoke it like men.”

“How the fuck does _a man_ smoke a joint?”

“Don’t worry,” Rust says, staring sagely out the windshield. “I’ll show you.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Settled in back home, they strip their work clothes away and assemble in the kitchen. Rust sits at the bar in nothing but his boxer briefs, finely chopping Ronald Whey’s generously-donated buds with a pair of kitchen scissors. Marty leans back against the fridge with his arms crossed, watching the other man steep down in what is obviously a well-thumbed preparation ritual.

“Christ, how often you smoke this stuff?” he asks, not bothering to shoo the cat away when she leaps up on the barstool next to Rust, peeking under his elbow to watch his hands at work.

“Been a while,” Rust says, opening the pack of rolling papers. “Probably a month or two before I left Alaska, last I rolled one up. Definitely wasn’t something I did a lot when I was on the force.”

He arranges a pretty generous line of herb down the center of some papers and goes about wrapping it up, leaving a little twist hanging off the far end. Doesn’t take long, and within a couple minutes he holds up the finished product for Marty to admire under the kitchen light.

“That’ll do it,” Rust says, setting the joint on the edge of the counter to clear everything away. He wraps the remaining weed back up in its bag and stows that and the rolling papers in an old cracker tin Marty dug out of the cabinet before sliding off the bar stool.

“Where’s the best place to light up?” Marty asks, but Rust is already leading the way down the hall.

“Unless you wanna skunk out the closet, the shower’s the place.”

When they’re in the bathroom, Marty watches Rust fold himself down into the tub and can’t help but laugh, though it comes out more like a giggle than anything. The door hasn’t quite latched behind them and the cat slides in like a curl of smoke herself, letting out a curious trill at the sight laid out before her.

“Get Ghost outta here,” Rust says, fixing her with a look like she somehow ought to know better. “I ain’t hot boxing the cat.”

Marty nudges her out the door with his foot and presses it shut until the bolt clicks, turning to step down into the tub.

“God, I feel like I’m nineteen again,” he says, trying to arrange himself against the ceramic so he’s wedged in the corner beside the faucet, knees hanging over the side of the bath. “This is a new brand of crazy, even for us.”

“We ain’t filming a stoner movie, Marty, we’re a couple of old wash-ups trying to get high.” Rust reaches up to draw the plastic curtain around them and pulls out the book of matches, striking one into life. He rolls the end of the blunt through the flame until the tip blackens and glows orange, then snuffs the match and takes the first hit.

“This is some potent shit,” Rust says on exhale, passing the blunt over to Marty and watching with sleepy eyes as he draws in a shallow pull. “Suck it straight down, breathe deep,” he urges, and Marty expels a cloud of smoke when he laughs.

“What are you, some kind of weed coach? Lemme warm up here,” he says, taking a stronger hit before blowing the smoke out through his nose. “Fuck, man, I haven’t done this since I was fresh out of college, back in the days when Maggie still had a bush growing.”

Rust has one bare leg bent at the knee and stretches out the other until it’s braced against the tile wall next to Marty. “I used to get this stuff in Alaska they call Thunderfuck, lay out in somebody’s truck bed under the sky and watch the Borealis roll in. Even when I was a kid that shit would funnel you down the nose of a fucking kaleidoscope, man. You’d go in and out like the fucking tide.”

“Don’t know if we ever had any that good,” Marty says, passing back to Rust. “I mostly remember trying to fuck on my roommate’s desk and going through Doritos like Grant through Richmond.”

He laughs, then, thunking his head back against the tile. “You’ll never believe this, but Maggie had a bowl, man. She was all about that shit until she left nursing school.”

“Fuhhh,” Rust says, blowing out a stream of smoke that curls up toward the ceiling. “You’re lying.”

“I’m dead serious,” Marty says, drawing off another pull. “She was the one I got high with for the first time. After some roller derby thing she had one night, we sat out in the parking lot and lit up.” He shakes his head, laughing. “I’ll tell you what, man, them knee pads sure came in handy later.”

“Claire was kind of the same way, before the accident,” Rust says. “She was always better at having a good time than I ever was.”

Marty feels like he’s got a free pass and decides to test the line a little. “What was she like?” he asks, peering at Rust through the haze. “Claire, I mean.”

“Dark eyes, olive skin,” Rust says, lashes drawn heavy. “Fucked like a rabbit and made love like the moon. Smart as a whip when it came to astronomy and earth science, but she acted like she never wanted to work in it. Didn’t take anybody’s shit—‘specially not any of mine.”

“Sounds like a good woman,” Marty says a little blandly, but Rust nods anyways.

“She was,” he says. “That she was.”

They puff and pass in silence for a few minutes more until the joint is down to its last leg, the bottom of the tub left smeared with ash.

“Last hit,” Rust says, raising the joint to Marty in a weak salute, and sucks off the roach between his fingertips before flicking what’s left into the toilet. He doesn’t exhale, though, and motions Marty to lean in, getting a hand around the back of his neck and pulling their faces close together.

Marty feels Rust thumb his bottom lip down and opens his mouth, drawing his eyes closed and breathing in deep as Rust’s lips brush soft up against his and channel a stream of smoke into his lungs. The drug rocks over him like a tidal wave and rings high noon behind his eyes, and there’s a moment where he thinks he might come in his shorts if he hasn’t ruined them already.

“God damn,” he says, all but breathing the words back into Rust’s mouth, and when he opens his eyes there are a pair of heavy-lidded ones peering back at him, bloodshot with dark pupils blown wide. “That what you call smoking up like a man?” he asks, just now noticing that Rust’s long fingers are braced up under his chin.

“Yeah,” Rust says softly, eyes dropping back down to Marty’s mouth. “I reckon so.”

They’re still tangled up in a mess of limbs behind the drawn shower curtain, sprawled flush across one another’s laps, and the journey from the empty tub to the bathroom floor takes more than a little jimmy and a scoot but soon enough they’re lying in a heap on the tile, crammed between the toilet and the wall and laughing fit to piss.

“Feel like I forgot how to work the doorknob,” Marty says, staring at the layer of smoke idly swirling around the ceiling with a faint crease drawn between his eyes. “Guess that means I’m gonna have to do you on the bathroom floor.”

“Naw,” Rust says, “we gotta ride this out first. Too smooth a high to think about fuckin’.”

“Guess you’re right,” Marty says, though he maneuvers around to nip along the edge of Rust’s jaw. “Dunno if I could even find my dick right now.”

“That's never been a problem before,” Rust says, reaching back to stick a finger under the bathroom door and cracking a grin when a familiar paw sweeps under to bat around their heads. “But we got time, man.”

“How much of that shit we got left?” Marty asks, giving up on Rust’s jaw to gently rake his fingers through the greying waves just now long enough to start curling around his ears. “Feel like I need to make an investment.”

“Couple good joints left,” Rust says, lifting his head so Marty can slide an arm underneath to support his neck. “I’d say Ronald Whey did us a solid when he split.”

“We should run down these deadbeat guys more often, kill two birds with one stone. Get my daily workout in and score some free weed to boot.”

“Says the guy fixin’ to be a grandpa,” Rust snorts. “You feeling your oats, old man?”

“Yeah,” Marty mumbles, idly tracing the blue sigil on Rust’s chest with the pad of his thumb. “I'm thinking so.”  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, y'all might have to forgive me where I falter because I am not a smoking connoisseur by any remote stretch of the word. Also, do private investigators actually do rundowns like this? (Lol they do now.) With all that being said, I had a ridiculously good time writing this chapter, so I hope it turns out to be a fun little read!


	16. it ain't bad

Marty still dreams about it sometimes.

Blood blooms like a red carnation on his shirtfront—more of a remembered decoration than a real wound now, because he doesn’t feel it in this place, not anymore—while he drags himself across the dirt floor of the throne room. It takes forever to reach Rust, too long, to slow, and by the time he gets there Childress has risen back up from the dust, whole and vibrating and alive, drawn back into a vague abstraction that Marty only remembers in this place as The Tall Man with the Scars. The voices of women and little girls ring shrill all around them while the air weighs down like wet copper on his tongue and this time Rust isn’t saying _he cut me pretty good, Marty_  
  
he isn’t saying anything at all.

Marty still tries to press his handkerchief against the wound but the skin gives way and his hand sinks down into Rust’s abdomen, swallowed up into the steel-split void of his gutted body, and every time he tries to pull it back Rust screams and screams and claws at him like he’s done it, like he’s the one who opened him wide to paint the yellow walls red. The Tall Man is there watching but he’s whispering something soft that mixes in with the screaming and Rust’s heart is a deerskin drum beating against his palm but it’s fading out fast and when he finally wrenches away—hand slipped loose like a newborn lamb from the ewe—out spills all Rust’s insides, hot and bloody and poured out in an offering of wine-dark libation—

 _“Marty,”_ Rust whispers, hand wrapped tight around his shoulder, gently shaking. “Marty, c’mon now, you’re dreaming.”

“Oh fuck,” are the words tumbling out of Marty’s mouth before he can even open his eyes against the dark. “Oh fuck,” he chokes out again, scrambling for the side of the bed, “I’m gonna—”

He retches once, twice, and still hardly anything comes up, just enough to spit in the trashcan under the bedside table. The acrid taste burns enough to make his eyes water while he rolls back over into bed, washed over with a fine sheen of cold sweat.

“Shit,” he says, drawing in a ragged breath. “That don’t ever get easy.”

“Can’t imagine it ever will,” Rust’s voice comes back, pitched low.

Marty kicks the sheet down the bed until he’s uncovered and wearing nothing but his boxers and t-shirt, shivering slightly against the air coming off the ceiling fan. “Sorry I woke you up,” he says, as if Rust gives a shit about bland courtesies like that. “Should be able to snap myself out of it by now.”

“What did you see?” Rust asks, lying motionless on the other side of the bed. Marty can’t quite see him in the dark but his voice comes in at an angle, and he knows he must be propped up on his side, blue eyes open and staring into the blackness between them.

“Nothing you wanna hear about. You’ve probably seen worse and fared far better.”

Rust clears his throat, light and sleepy. “Don’t know about any of that,” he says, and there’s a brief pause like he’s busy hand-picking out his words, rolling them around in his palm to inspect each side. “Try me.”

They both lay quiet for a few moments, and then Marty shifts around, tangling his side of the sheet around his legs. “Carcosa,” he says, serious. “You. Me. There’s one beer left and Childress is having us do the hula—”

“Oh fuck you, man—you were about ready to puke up a fucking lung.”

Marty swallows against the bitter taste still lingering on his tongue. “Woke up a little too fast, is all.”

“Is it still that bad?” Rust asks. There’s no judgment or pity in it, thank God, just an undercurrent of contemplative curiosity, the way he talks when he’s trying to reconcile a matter of fact.

“Naw Rust, it ain’t that bad,” Marty says, trying to be flippant, but the familiar nearness of that little string of words slams into him hard and then the memory is getting sucked like a raw hickey up to the surface all over again.

He makes quick work of turning over to face the wall and draws in a sharp breath that maybe catches fast around the edges despite his best efforts, and every fucking bit of it’s in vain, because it may be dark but there’s no way Rust can’t see him now.

“You’re full of shit, Marty,” he says, closing the gap between them and finding Marty in the dark. He slides in close until they’re pressed together in a long line, and the little patch of skin where Marty’s shirt has ridden up at the small of his back burns hot when he slots in against it.

Rust reaches an arm around to rest his hand against the softness of Marty’s belly, warm and familiar through the thin cotton, and presses his nose into the fine hair at the base of his neck.

“I ain’t talking about this anymore,” Marty says in weak warning, words a little unsteady on their feet.

Rust’s lips graze soft against his skin when he mumbles, “It’s a good thing I ain’t asking you to, then.”

Quiet edges by in a thrumming heartbeat, then—

“And just so you know, you don’t gotta sit here and hold me tender like we’re in some fuckin' Lifetime movie.”

“I don’t,” Rust agrees, making no real effort to move. “But if you don’t shut up and go back to sleep I’m gonna have to flip you over and screw you like we’re in one.”

“Yeah, and maybe I’ll cry a little bit for you too,” Marty snorts, but his breath stutters up in his chest when Rust’s hand works down to cup him through his shorts.

“Boy, you must’ve not wanted to sleep anyways,” he says, sagging back against Rust and then rutting forward into his palm, just a little. “That ain’t playing fair.”

Rust pushes himself up on one elbow and gently turns Marty over until he’s lying flat on his back again, bracing himself up over him in a vague outline manifested in the dark. Doesn’t say anything as he drags a hand up Marty’s abdomen and chest and takes his cotton t-shirt with it, thumb briefly brushing over a jagged-edged scar when he works the shirt over his head.

“Jesus Christ,” Marty says, letting Rust tip his chin back to expose the line of his neck, trying not to gasp when he starts mouthing against his pulse. “You weren’t kidding.”

“Gotta get your mind focused on other things,” Rust says, stretching a long-fingered hand down south, and god damn if it doesn’t work.  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the cutoff there at the end, but I've been promising a throwback to the salted caramel cake for a while and I think that chapter's going to be The Big One in terms of getting hot n' heavy. (It's coming though, I swear to you; consider this a teaser for impending events.) 
> 
> And why have the past three chapters ended with them lying down with one another? I feel like Eric Kripke, wrapping up the last five minutes of every Supernatural episode with Meaningful Brother Talk On the Hood of the Impala. Anyhow y'all, the next installment is tentatively revolving around the birth of Audrey's new baby, and once I get that out of the way it's open water from here on out. Just how far will this thing go? Where I stop, nobody knows.


	17. miss delilah

Figures, that it’d take a late-night trip to Walmart for cat food and laundry detergent before reality swings low enough to finally clip him.

Rust goes off to dig around the beer cooler with a bag of kibble slung over one shoulder, leaves Marty staring at the DVD sale rack in electronics with a plan to meet up back in household cleaners before heading to checkout. He walks away and Marty has all the intentions of following—even puts down the clearance copy of _Bonanza_ and proceeds to make his merry way, watching as a familiar head of sandy-grey waves disappears into beverages in the distance—, but far as he gets, it just wasn’t in the cards to make it.

Three minutes later, Rust is standing in front of the laundry soap with neither hide nor hair of Marty in sight. A look thrown toward electronics proves fruitless until he doubles back for another take and finds the man in question stopped at the halfway point of his proposed path, and even from this distance he can clock Marty’s existential crisis look from a mile away.

He’s standing in the baby department.

“The hell are you doing?” Rust asks as he walks up, maneuvering the bag of cat food around until it’s balanced on his hip. He glances at the rack of pink and yellow newborn onesies on his immediate left and closes his eyes against them like a vision, blinking brief and tight before looking at Marty as if he’s standing at the end of a tunnel. “The cat has probably eaten a hole through the—shit Marty, what’s wrong?”

When Marty turns to look at him his eyes are lit glassy bright, pink-stained sclera making his irises stand out harsh and icy. He tries to laugh it off but the sound gets caught in his craw, falls flat and bounces once on the tile like a glass before shattering.

“Little late for your biological clock to kick in,” Rust says, and the words don’t come out as steady as he’d hoped, fine-edged with more weak rasp than humor.

“You think this could be a second chance?” Marty asks, dragging the back of his hand across his eyes and blinking fast under the fluorescent light. “To do—to do it right, you know? The whole way through?”

“For you, maybe,” Rust says, angled in such a way that he can see Marty in his peripherals but the baby clothes remain hidden behind him. His grip tightens and then loosens on the case of beer in his left hand. “I’ve never entertained any ideas about taking a second stab at fatherhood.”

Marty sucks in a shallow breath and then coughs out another laugh. “Well start entertainin’, asshole,” he says, cutting a watery look at Rust from the corner of his eye. “We’re about to be in this shit together.”

Rust only turns on his heel and walks to checkout.  
  


* * *  
  


The first week in July, Marty gets an email from Audrey with an attached photo of her sitting in a nest of tall grass, hands clasped in her lap, eyes cast down and away with her top pulled up to expose her bare belly. She’s painted the round swell of her stomach with a spray of pink and blue wildflowers and wears a woven crown of yellow marigolds as garland in her hair.

It takes a few deep breaths before he can focus enough to read the short message she’s typed out.

_Orren’s parents insisted on paying for a maternity shoot so I figured I’d do it my way. Have you and Rust started making your bets yet? –Audrey_

Later that night, Rust brings his tea glass up to his mouth and holds it there, watching Marty gnaw on a shake-and-bake pork chop that might’ve suffered through a little too much shaking and baking, though he figures at least they’ll know better for next time.

“You heard from Audrey lately?” he asks. It remains an unspoken fact that her due date is later in the month, and Marty may or may not have the day programmed into his phone calendar with an alarm in place, like somehow, maybe, he’d have the gall to forget.

Marty glances up from his plate and then back down, the movement fast enough that he knows he’s blown his own cover right out of the gate. “Yeah,” he says, trying not to wince. “Still not letting on about whether the kid’s a boy or a girl.”

Rust rolls his wrist and swirls the tea around the bottom of his glass before taking a swig. “Mmhmm. That all?”

“Listen,” Marty says, running a thumb along the edge of his plate. “She sent a picture—maternity shoot, you know—, but you don’t need to see it. Sounds fucking crazy, but it’s too much of a throwback to shit better left forgotten.” He fumbles for a moment, gives a weary shake of his head. “She doesn’t _know_ , man, but we do.”

Rust could have the photo pulled up from his own laptop in about two minutes flat, but he just stacks his dishes and carries them to the sink. “I’ll take your word for it,” he says, and starts filling the sink with hot water. “Get over here and help me dry.”

That night Marty dreams of fire-scrubbed cane fields, a dead doe he and Rust once saw on the side of the road while driving in from the bayou, hit so hard her unborn fawn had come bursting out of the womb.

The next morning he pulls up the email and deletes it. Thinks if it were an actual photo, there’s a good chance he might’ve burned it.  
  


* * *  
  


The third week in July, Marty’s cell phone rings a little past four in the morning. In a weird tilt-shift dynamic he’d found himself sitting at the kitchen counter with half a glass of milk, watching the cat crunch her way through kibble bits while Rust lay sleeping down the hall.

“Maggie?” he says on pickup, stomach clenching like a fist in his gut. “What is it?”

“Were you already awake?” Maggie asks, laughing quietly into the receiver, the way she does when she shakes her head in disbelief. “I don’t know if you’ve ever picked up on the first ring like that.”

“No,” Marty says. “I—shit, yeah, I’ve been up. What’s going on?”

“Audrey’s water broke around two,” Maggie says, and then cuts back in before Marty can open his mouth. “ _Don’t_ kill yourself trying to get over here like a bat out of hell—you know how slow the first one can go, and if she takes after me we’re likely to not see a baby until tonight or tomorrow morning sometime.”

“Twenty-two hours with Audrey,” Marty sighs, rubbing a hand up over his hair. “I remember.”

“And I’ll never forget,” Maggie sighs, though there’s a trace of smile thrumming warm in her voice. “Listen, is Rust…?”

“He’ll come too,” Marty says, firm enough that he believes it. “He’ll be there.”

Silence beats across the connection for a few moments. “Alright,” Maggie says eventually, pitched soft. “Call me when you get here. I’ll probably drive up around seven unless something crazy happens, God forbid. Baton Rouge General Birth Center, second floor.”

“Thanks Mags,” Marty says, and she hums out a sleepy reply before ending the call.

When Marty slips back into his side of the bed, he reaches out and runs a hand down the line of Rust’s back until he stirs.

“The baby’s coming,” is all he manages to get out, waiting until Rust’s breathing shifts into a waking pattern.

“You gotta go?” he murmurs, rolling over and blinking at Marty in the dark.

“Not just yet. We probably need to leave around six, get there close to seven. Guess labor’s going pretty slow so far but I’d rather not push our luck.”

“Marty, I don’t think I—”

“Who the fuck else is going to pick my ass up off the floor if I keel over?” Marty says, standing from the bed and walking toward the door. “Just—do me a favor and come along as moral support, alright? That’s all I’m asking.”

Rust looks at him under the weight of heavy-drawn lids, silhouetted there in the doorway by the kitchen light creeping weak down the hall.

“All right,” he says, and tries not to think.  
  


* * *  
  


The smell of hospital rolls over them both like a sterile wave, slapping a familiar swarm of memories back into too-vivid life. Rust feels his teeth set on edge as soon as he walks in, cutting hard against bleached-out white and the green tile floor pattern that seems to come standard in every healthcare institution he’s had the misfortune of seeing the inside the lower forty-eight.

There’d been a time back at Northshore when he’d count each green square on his way to group therapy on Tuesdays and Thursdays, one through sixty-four, number seventeen cracked diagonally in one corner, number forty-one discolored by a corrosive chemical spilled on it after some past fuck-up or another.

He tilts his head now as he walks, trying to pour the numbers from his ear and back onto the floor. He’d already counted up to twelve.

Maggie greets them in the lobby with an update and then leads the way toward Audrey’s room, not bothering to turn around when both men stop short a few yards away from the door.

“Go on ahead and see her,” Rust says, close enough that he speaks the words into the tight pocket of air between Marty’s neck and shoulder. “Maggie said they’ve already given her the epidural, so she shouldn’t be in much pain right now. She’ll want to see you beforehand.”

“Okay,” Marty breathes out, slowly unraveling himself from the orbit of Rust’s gravitational pull. “You gonna be in the waiting room?”

“Between there and the smoking balcony, you’ll know where to find me,” Rust says, clapping him once on the shoulder and squeezing. “Tell Audrey I said hey.”

Marty watches him slip through the automatic doors leading out of the labor and delivery ward before he walks into the room.  
  


* * *  
  


Not long past noon, Orren Gunther pokes his head through the waiting room doors with raw nerves spread clear across his face. He pops off one of his characteristic Crest-white smiles, but his bottom lip wavers enough to give him away.

“She’s getting ready to push,” he says. “The doctor’s on her way downstairs right now so it shouldn’t be too long. We’ll let you guys know when the—when the baby’s here.” He blows out a gust of air that seems to make him deflate on the spot. “Oh Jesus. The baby.”

After he walks back out, Macie sets down her rummy hand and throws a $10 bill on the coffee table in front of Rust and Marty. Maggie quirks an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything, only flips the page in her magazine before mumbling something to Orren’s mother under her breath.

“How much do you wanna bet it’s a boy?” Macie asks, tip of her tongue caught between her teeth.

“Put your Monopoly money away,” Marty snorts before fanning his cards out at arms-length, a side effect of having forgotten his reading glasses at home. “It ain’t even a real bet until you start breaking out the twenties.”

Rust discards without looking up. “It’s a girl,” he says, the words already cast and forged in fire, and fifty-three minutes later it turns out he was right.  
  


* * *  
  


It’s not until he follows Maggie into the recovery room that Marty realizes he’d been holding his breath. Once he rounds the corner in the doorway it all whooshes out at once, lungs two soaked sponges wrung dry, and the first pull of air he draws back in burns in sync with heat gathering fast behind his eyes.

“Congratulations, sweetheart,” Maggie says, saving him the task of trying to speak, and he smiles through the bright ache as he watches her press a kiss to Audrey’s forehead, taking the little pink-swaddled bundle that Orren offers up and cradling her close.

Maggie sits down in the recliner next to the bed and Marty approaches Audrey from the opposite side, reaching out to squeeze her fingers. “You did good, darlin’,” he says, rubbing his thumb over the back of her hand. “You did real good.”

“Thanks, Dad,” she says, smiling up at him with tired eyes. “What do you think of my little flower?”

“Your little flower?” Marty laughs, walking around to squat down next to Maggie before peering into the baby’s tiny pink face. Her eyes are scrunched shut and there’s a knit hat tucked over her head, but the bow of her top lip is whittled just like Audrey’s, a sweet little echo of something he remembers from his own mother’s face.

“What’s her name?” he asks around the lump in his throat, smoothing a finger over the baby’s hand, and Maggie smiles soft and shrugs.

“Audrey and Orren haven’t told us yet,” she says, looking toward her daughter. “Are you ready for the big reveal?”

Audrey seems to busy herself with taking a headcount, ticking off all the great-grandparents and Macie but still coming up one short. After a moment her brow crumples and a faint crease pulls tight between her eyes. “Where’s Rust?” she asks. “I wanted the whole family to be here when we tell you.”

“Uh, out in the—he’s out in the waiting room,” Marty says, avoiding the look Maggie pitches his way as he rises on creaking joints. “Hold on just a second.”  
  


* * *  
  


Marty nearly runs into Rust as he’s walking out of the visitors bathroom, throws a hand up to brace against the other man’s chest so they don’t crack heads.

“C’mon,” he says, a little breathless. “I need you.”

Rust draws out one of those slow blinks and takes a half-assed survey of Marty, one quick flick of his eyes down and back up. “I don’t see you actively keeling over.”

“Not like that,” Marty says, sighing and drumming his fingers over Rust’s heart. “Audrey wants you to come meet the baby.”

“Thought we agreed I’d be here for moral support, Marty.”

Marty squares his jaw and nods, spits out a brittle laugh that falls fast for the tile. “Yeah Rust,” he says, “except it occurs to me that this ain’t a one-time gig. You forget we’re living together, doing whatever the hell it is we’re doing, and I wager you’re going to be seeing this kid on the regular someday unless you want to roll on out of here tonight and not look back.”

His hand slides down Rust’s chest and drops away but he holds his gaze without faltering, bright blue boring into a deeper shade. “That being said, I reckon you two should go ahead and get acquainted.”

Rust cuts his eyes away, staring hard at some point in the middle-distance. It takes him a few seconds to find his voice. “I’ve been smoking. They don’t want that around the baby.”

“As long as you’re not blowing smoke into her face I’m thinking you’ll be fine. Jesus man, come on, I haven’t even heard her name yet.”

“Then what the fuck are you doing out here with me?”

“Dragging your ass back in there with me is what,” Marty says, getting a hand around Rust’s elbow. “I don’t know if this has gotten through your stubborn skull yet, but we’re family now. You, me, Audrey, Macie, the baby—it ain’t much of a family, but it’s all I’ve got, alright? And Christ knows you could use some of it too.”

“My God, Marty,” Rust says, though he lets himself be steered down the hall into the recovery ward. “You have that written down somewhere?”

“Yeah, on the back of my strategic plan to knock some fucking sense into you.”

“How’s that been working out so far, exactly?”

Marty laughs high in his throat and snakes his arm around Rust’s stiffened waist. “Can’t say just yet,” he says, palming the other man’s hip even as a nurse walks by. “It’s still a work in progress.”  
  


* * *  
  


Rust moves like a deer when he walks into the room, a careful shadow pressed between Marty and the wall, stepping lightly on tensed legs meant to help him spring away at the first sign of peril.

“Hey Rust,” Audrey says, just the same as always. “Glad you could be here with us today.”

“Congratulations,” he says, a little hoarse, steering well clear of the corner where Macie sits holding the baby. “How're you feeling?”

“Like I got hit by a train,” Audrey says, though her eyes shine a little brighter than before. “But it was worth it, you know? None of the pain matters anymore.”

Marty clears his throat and looks around the room, eyebrows askew. “Well, are we gonna hear this little girl’s name today or not?”

“Her name is Mercedes Delilah,” Audrey says, smiling as Orren tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “Lilah for short.”

“Mercedes Delilah?” Marty repeats, a little louder than he intended. “That sounds like something you’d hear from a girl swinging around the p—”

The heel of Rust’s boot grinds down hard into the top of Marty’s foot, making him suck the words back into his mouth before they can take full flight.

“That’s a beautiful name, sweetheart,” he blurts out, ripping his shoe out from under Rust's boot. “Lilah—that's lovely, just lovely.”

“Here Dad, you haven’t held her yet,” Macie says, standing up and leaving the recliner open next to the bed.

“Been a good long while since I last did this,” Marty says, easing back into the chair and letting Macie shift Lilah into his hands. “Hey there, little bit.”

He grins when she cracks open an eye, then looks up to find Rust across the room, pressing himself against the wall and out of the way as the great-grandparents bid farewell to go on a coffee run.

“C’mere and meet Miss Delilah,” he says, and Rust slowly comes around to stand at this side, hands hitched close to his hips.

“She’s small,” he says, ignoring Marty’s snort to look toward Audrey. “How much does she weigh?”

“Seven pounds, six ounces,” Audrey says, spitting an ice cube back into her water cup. “Just a little below average, but you’re not gonna hear me complaining.” She tilts her head to the side, watching Rust’s eyes rove feather-light over the baby as she flexes a tiny hand against the pink blanket. “You can hold her, Rust,” she says, speaking a little softer than before. “She won’t break.”

Rust closes his eyes, breathes deep through his nose. Opens them and resists the indistinct urge to pull the loose thread hanging off the end of Audrey’s hospital-issue blanket, close enough that he’d just have to take one step forward and yank, find out if it’d snap off or unravel there in his hands.

“Let me sit down first,” he says, quiet.

“You sure?” Marty asks, and Rust nods, a quick little movement edging its foot in the door before he changes his mind. He waits until Marty stands before dropping into the empty chair, holding himself so his back and elbows don’t quite brush against the plastic-covered cushion.

Lilah squirms and lets out a whine while Marty maneuvers her around but goes quiet once she’s settled back in, head cradled in the palm of Rust’s right hand, body supported by the wide spread of his left.

The petal-softness and sweet, balmy smell of her skin pulls him back to a time and place nearly thirty years gone, but the brush with memory doesn’t ache like he thought it would, presses a thumb against aged bruises but swipes over them rather than digging into the brassy plum.

“Delilah,” he murmurs, trying the word on for size, letting each syllable tap lazily against the roof of his mouth. “A child of the Dahlia. The little flower.”

“Looks like you’re the first person to catch on to that,” Audrey says, sharing a smile with Orren.

“Catch onto what?” Marty says, looking between Rust and Audrey. On the futon under the TV Maggie and Macie stop their quiet conversation to listen.

“Miss Delilah is a hybrid variety of the Dahlia,” Rust says. “They generally hold up better in a bad freeze, or so I’ve heard.”

“Have you literally gone through every goddamn issue of National Geographic in creation?” Marty says, wiping a tired hand over his face. “We need to get you on Jeopardy sometime, pay off the house.”

“Nah,” Rust says, letting his middle finger rest light against the fragile pulse thrumming in the baby’s neck. There’s comfort in the habit of what used to be quiet ritual, something he did two lifetimes ago inside four walls of a violet-painted nursery in Texas. Touching the gentle hum of new life, feeling the newfound soul beat butterfly-soft under the tips of his fingers.

“Speaking of names, have you decided who’s Grandpa and who's PopPop yet?” Macie asks, casually twirling a piece of hair around her finger. Marty gives her a startled look and waits for the punchline, but when one doesn’t come he glances at Rust and feels his jaw work like it’s hanging on a loose hinge.

“Ah, well, I don’t really know if—”

“I can be Pop, I guess,” Rust says, pulling back Lilah’s hat enough to smooth his thumb over the honey-brown thatch of hair peeking down from the top of her head. “Marty’s older, he gets Grandpa by default.”

Marty turns to look out the window for a moment, sniffing maybe a few too many times when he turns back around.

“Christ,” he says, clearing his throat. “Yeah, you can be Pop, you asshole. Reckon that makes me Grandpa.”  
  


* * *  
  


Later, sitting under the indigo swathe of freshly-fallen night, Rust gets halfway through a cigarette before leaning over to snub it out on the concrete.

Marty sits next to him on the designated smokers’ bench—one arm running along the length of the back with his other hand wrapped around a paper coffee cup—and raises an eyebrow as he sets his decaf down between his thighs.

“I believe that’s the first time I’ve ever seen you give up on a light that somebody didn’t take out of your hand.”

“Mmm,” Rust hums, settling back against the bench. “Figure it might be time to go ahead and start giving it up. Ain’t doing myself or anybody else any favors in the long run.”

Marty tilts his head back and laughs, looking up at the few stars bright enough to shine through the city lights. “You’re just having one big epiphany of a fucking day, aren’t you?”

“Something like that,” Rust says, letting his gaze join Marty’s up in the sky. “Your strategic plan just might be working yet.”  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh lord, where do I begin?
> 
> This chapter has been a long time in coming. The idea of Rust interacting with babies in a post-Sophia setting has been one I've struggled with for a while now, so I'm not very sure if I got him quite _right_ here. A lot of time has passed, but is thirty years enough to heal his wounds? Will he EVER heal? There's a complex peculiarity about the man's personality and emotions that continually evades me, so if it ever feels like Marty's got the better end of dialogue and characterization, that's probably because he does.
> 
> The baby's name admittedly started out as a joke, but so many people seemed to like it that I couldn't think of anything else. So--Mercedes Delilah Gunther, welcome aboard.


	18. something wild

Marty turns 54 on the twenty-first of August, a full and heavily-pregnant month before the fall of the autumnal equinox. It’s a good long stretch before the leaves start to shake off their green in favor of copper-scarlet patina and the air gets crisp around the edges but where the warmth of the afternoon starts to melt out like caramel, dripping with slow-straggling globs of humidity and a hint of decay, and when Rust steps outside on a still evening he can taste the impending death of summer lingering like a promise in the air.

What’s left of Marty’s hair is a thatch of heavy corn silk, eyes like two bits of robin eggshell pushed out of the nest at spring’s end. Laughter like a coyote’s bark across the marshy scrubland before dusk, skin sparsely freckled and tinged pink from long weekends spent out under the heavy-handed sun. When he’s in a mood he tastes like the air before one of the last good thunderstorms of the season and there’s no small doubt, Rust muses, that Martin Hart has always been a child of the summer.

At daybreak on the twenty-first, Rust wakes up seven minutes before the alarm goes off and spends five of them following the gentle rise and fall of Marty’s chest like a cotton-swathed metronome, ticking off the seconds in a steady tide. When there’s one minute to spare he braces himself on an elbow and presses his lips to the corner of Marty’s mouth, feels the surprised gust of breath warm against his cheek when the other man shifts out of dreaming.

“Shit,” Marty murmurs, blinking awake in the brightening half-light. “You gonna be sweet like that all day?”

“Just might,” Rust says, and reaches over Marty to palm the clock radio off before it has the chance to alarm.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Giving and receiving wrapped gifts is a ritual Rust learned relatively late in life, and not long after it began to matter—he sometimes remembers tying a lopsided red bow to the handlebars of a new tricycle, has to swallow hard against bile when he does—it fell right back into quiet obscurity. In the times Before and After, any favor or small kindness is a gift and any material item pushed his way or vice versa is either unwarranted indulgence or stipulated necessity, glossy paper and scissor-curled ribbons be damned.

Marty didn’t figure out his birthday until the winter of ’97 and even then only because Cathleen owed him a favor and pulled a peek at the relevant file. The morning of February the eighth he bought a box of pink-frosted Valentines cupcakes at the Piggly Wiggly and left them on the edge of Rust’s desk, a silent offering left at the feet of a stone sentinel.

Rust did not touch them that day, nor the next, and on the morning of the third Marty flipped a paperclip across his desk into Rust’s lap and said, “You plan on eating those before they draw ants or what?”

Later, coming back from a fruitless romp around the file room, Marty would find Cathleen doling out six vanilla cupcakes to anybody who wanted one on heart-printed paper towels.

“Rust said you brought these in?” she’d said, dark eyes pulled tight around the edges, and when he sat back down at his desk Rust’s only reply was to sit there and do all his breathing through the filter of a cigarette.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Nigh on twenty years later and a week before Marty’s birthday, Rust opens up his laptop and types four words into the google search engine bar. Goes through three different links before he finds one he likes, fetches a piece of paper and scrawls down a list of things he’ll need to pick up at the grocery. Self-rising flour, sea salt, heavy whipping cream, a bottle of vanilla extract. A fucking whisk, because he and Marty have only ever scrambled their eggs with a fork.

He opens the cupboard where they keep the pans and finds three pots of varying sizes, a flat baking sheet that’s seen a lifetime’s worth of pizzas and peanut butter cookies sent into the oven, and two skillets scratched to hell, courtesy of Marty habitually forgetting to use the rubber spatula.

Goes back to his list and adds _cake pan_ , too.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The twenty-first falls on a Wednesday, smack-dab between the resolution of one case and the beginning of another. Rust and Marty make a rare stop for coffee in the morning and then head to the office like any other day, take phone calls and count old staple holes in the drywall and trawl through archives from ten until three.

Shelley the part-time file clerk and secretary comes in around four on her day off and kisses Marty on the cheek, hands him a card in a yellow envelope that contains two tickets to the upcoming rodeo put on by the PBR circuit.

“Rust needs to get himself a pair of Wranglers before you go,” she says, winking at Marty from behind Rust’s back while she waters the unkillable fern hanging off a dusty exercise bike in the corner. “Those khaki chinos you wear aren’t gonna cut it, babydoll.”

“You got any advice I could actually use, Shelley?” Rust asks, flipping to a new page in his notebook without looking up.

“Yeah,” Shelley says, pausing her watering to fist a hand on one hip. “Insurance company called here yesterday looking for you and I took down the message. Said they have some questions about a life insurance policy.”

Marty pushes his reading glasses up on his forehead to watch Rust from the corner of his eye. “What’s all this, now?”

“Nothing you need to worry about,” Rust says, standing and securing the elastic band around his ledger. “Just had some questions for them, is all.”

He glances at his wristwatch and then back up at Marty. “What time we wrapping up here? I believe I’m taking you out to dinner.”

“Sounds like somebody’s getting wined and dined,” Shelley says with a wistful sigh, swinging out of the room toward the front desk. “My last boyfriend wanted to go to the strip club for my birthday. Sure wish I had a Rustin Cohle of my own there, Marty.”

A flush so hot it looks painful is crawling up Marty’s neck. “Best be careful what you wish for, sweetheart,” he says, laughing as he dodges the pen Rust chucks at his head.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


One steak dinner and a sensible number of drinks at the ale house later finds Rust standing in the kitchen in nothing but his pants and standard wifebeater, coating the bottom of a freshly-washed cake pan with flour.

A curling tendril of déjà vu lingers along the borderlands of his senses as he rolls the top of the flour bag back down, slowly reeling him back into the greater matrix, but he pushes it aside when Marty walks into the kitchen and gets a good look at the sprawl of ingredients taking up most of the counter.

“I must be gettin’ senile in my old age,” he says, looking between Rust and the unopened bottle of vanilla extract in his hand. “I can’t seem to recall you baking anything from scratch. Uh— _ever_.”

“Likely because I haven’t,” Rust says, trailing a finger down the printout in front of him. “About to, though.”

Marty tries to peek over his shoulder at the recipe. “I need to worry about you poisoning me?” he asks, chuckling as Rust shoulders him out of the way.

“I can follow a goddamn recipe, Marty, for Christ’s sake. Go sit down and let me work or you’re gonna be out of a birthday cake.”

“Oh really now?” Marty crows, a crooked grin spread wide across his face. “What kind of cake?”

“You’ll see,” Rust says, corners of his mouth quirking up as he measures flour out into a bowl.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“Cake’s a fucking mess,” Rust says, appraising the carnage with his fingers hitched up on his hips, mouth pinched into a firm line. The middle is sunken in and the corners didn’t quite burn but veer pretty damn close. “Let’s hope it tastes better than it looks.”

“Who needs a pretty cake when I’ve got your sweet ass around?” Marty says, ambling over from the living room and snapping a dishtowel in Rust’s direction. “Could balance a beer on that thing if the wind was right.”

“I’ll have to add that to my list of special skills,” Rust deadpans, wiping crumbs off the counter into the palm of his hand. He turns and pulls two plates out of the cabinet and clumsily scoops a crumbling chunk onto each, drizzling caramel sauce over the frosting with an unfamiliar twist of his hand.

“It don’t look so bad, Rust. The girls used to make me peanut butter and ham cheese sandwiches when they were little and if I could eat that shit, I can eat anything.” Marty eyeballs the caramel for a second before cutting his back gaze up, mouth poised in a curious _o_. “Hey, is this…?”

“You tell me,” Rust says, handing a forkful over and watching Marty arch an eyebrow up before popping it into his mouth.

“Damn that’s good,” he says after a moment, licking the fork tines clean and picking up his plate. “It’s ugly as hell but you turned out the flavor down pat. Go ahead and take a bite.”

Rust takes a corner off one piece and brings it up to his mouth, hyperaware of how Marty’s eyes rest heavy on him, like he’s more interested in watching Rust than eating his own piece.

He stalls the fork a few inches away from his mouth and narrows his eyes. “If you start pulling some kind of food fetish shit I’m walking out the front door right now.”

_“Me?”_ Marty asks through another mouthful of cake. “You’re the one who looks like you’ve just creamed your shorts every time you eat this stuff. When we were at that restaurant with Audrey and Orren a few months back I had half the mind to take you to the bathroom and wear you out.”

“I have an acute palette,” Rust says, like that’s all there is to it, and then finally opens his mouth and lets the cake melt on his tongue. The rich salty-sweet makes his jaw ache but the flavor washes over him in that familiar warmth, sparking a tingling hint of euphoria that he can feel all the way down to his fingertips.

“Not half bad,” he says, unconsciously running his tongue along his lower lip in a slow little flourish. “Might be onto something.”

Marty barks out a laugh. “Shit, I’d say so. If sugar mellowed you out like that every time I’d be running a fucking bakery by now.”

“There’s a retirement plan for you,” Rust says, and the way Marty looks at him, it’s like some part of him is almost considering it.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


After a quarter of the cake has gone missing, a call from Audrey and Macie apiece, and Marty successfully dumps a glob of caramel sauce down the front of his favorite work shirt, Rust rinses their plates in the sink and settles down on the couch, listening to a familiar string of swears muffled by the sound of running water as they drift down the hall from the bathroom.

The night is textured pliable around the middle, like maybe it’d ebb and give if you pressed your fingers into the softness of it. Some of the strings holding Rust aloft feel like they’ve been waxed and warmed by the heat of sure hands, bowed in and slackened enough to let his limbs sag back into the sofa, cut loose and set out on temporary leave.

Marty returns from the bathroom with his shirt unbuttoned, damp-darkened on the right side where he’s scrubbed caramel from the soft grey linen. Rust watches him dig around under the kitchen sink, likely hunting for the stain remover they generally keep in the laundry room, and opens his mouth without any overture, letting the words roll out easy over his tongue and spill into the air.

“It’s pushing midnight and we’ve got a client meeting at o-nine hundred,” he says, sights skimming over the carpet. “If either one of us is gettin’ laid tonight you’d better go ahead and make up your mind.”

“Christ,” Marty snorts, knocking the cabinet shut and bracing his hands flat against the countertop. “Seeing as how it’s my birthday you’d think I wouldn’t have to do all the work for once.”

Rust doesn’t laugh. His eyes move like the lazy lob of a bull whip, one short snap up to Marty that’s so sharp it damn near cuts the air cut between them. “You posing some kind of challenge?”

“Ain’t posing anything,” Marty says, tilting his chin up just a minute little fraction of an inch, and no it ain’t a challenge, but then again it always was.

His gaze drops like a palmed switchblade and Rust spreads one long-fingered hand out, runs it slow down the length of his thigh to smooth out the creases in his pants. “Wouldn’t be hard, bending you over the counter,” he says, tempered casual. “I could do it right now.”

“Did I say anything about any of that?” Marty says, pitched back just as easy, but judging by the shiver that crawls up his spine and bursts at the base of his skull there’s no small lack of certainty in his mind that Rust could do just that. He clears his throat, eyes skirting over the planes of the other man’s face. “Never said you couldn’t, though.”

Rust bridges their line of sight now, lids drawn languid and heavy. “If you want me to fuck you, Marty,” he says, lashes dipping into half a blink, “I’ll fuck you.”

Marty’s mouth feels like it’s crumbled to ash but the words burn hot in the pit of his stomach, roil up a heady mixture of dread and excitement, two parts _hell no_ and three straight shots of _fuck yes_. He’s standing on the collapsing edge of the vast unknown, peering down at something that suddenly feels like The Most Dangerous game, and for the first time since the budding dawn of his self-creation he’s filling the role of the hunted and not the hunter, staring down the tip of someone else’s arrow—and maybe that’s where this has been headed all along, this whole time, because god damn if it ain’t something wild.

And so here it is.

“You gonna talk about it all night,” Marty finally says, hating how there’s a hairline fracture riding along the undercurrent of his voice, “or do you reckon you’re gonna get over here and show me?”

Rust blinks once, pulls the long lines of his body up from the couch and stands in one languid stretch of muscle skin and bone. Four short strides bring him toe-to-toe with Marty but he doesn’t let their bodies collide, just slots their mouths together in a soft brush of a kiss—nothing more than the barest rasp of chafed lips and stubble, noses skimming light as they make contact—, but when he pulls back and away Marty nearly tips forward into the empty space between them.

“C’mon,” Rust says, leading the way down the hall, and there’s a moment of blinking through the surrounding world as it smears into watercolor and light trails, so real and dizzying that Marty wonders if he didn’t just plunge into one of Rust’s synaptic misfires secondhand.

When he gets his balance back under him he follows in Rust’s wake, fingers whispering along the white walls until he steps foot through the bedroom doorway.

The lamp beside the bed is the only light burning, partially eclipsed by Rust’s form where he’s perched on the edge of the mattress facing the door. His wifebeater is pulled out of his pants and he sits with his elbows braced on his knees, hands dropped down between the wide spread of his legs. His hair is just long enough on the top to fall over his forehead, and if Marty squints in the yellow light it’s almost like looking eighteen years into the past, back at the beginning of what must’ve always been their foregone conclusion.

They watch one another for a moment, letting the air settle in around them, until Marty balks and cuts his line first.

“Rust, listen, I—”

“Come here,” Rust says, holding one hand palm-up in an offering, and Marty closes his eyes, finds Rust through the gold-toned dark behind his eyelids and takes it.

“I ain’t some virgin prom queen,” he says, letting the words drop into Rust’s hair. “If you’re gonna do this shit you better damn well do it like you mean it.”

The angle they’re at keeps his expression hidden but Marty can hear the thin edge of a smile in Rust’s voice when he speaks. “You ever known me to half-ass anything, Marty?”

“That ain’t even fucking funny,” Marty says, words wound tight, and Rust laughs deep in his chest, the throaty rasping of it vibrating through the both of them as he gets his fingers through Marty’s belt loops and pulls himself up off the bed.

Their pants end up in a pile on the floor and Rust tugs Marty’s button-down off his shoulders, gets his hands up underneath his cotton undershirt and pulls it up and away. Clothes disappear piece by piece until they’re standing there naked as anything sprung up from the earth, and Marty’s got that look on his face like he’s fixing to bite through his own tongue so Rust grabs his hips and pushes him back onto the bed, sliding in after him until his groin is slotted in tight against the virgin whiteness of Marty’s thigh.

Rust’s got the upper hand and crashes his lips into Marty’s, long fingers braced around his jaw, licking hot into the seam of his mouth until he can taste the ochre-orange tension bleeding out between them, rolling off Marty in waves like heat from a blacktop.

One shallow thrust against Marty’s thigh pulls a moan loose and he snakes a hand down south, cups his palm around the other man’s balls and swipes two fingers around until he brushes against his taint. He knows he’s found it when Marty nearly bucks off the bed, lit up like a raw nerve held too close to the flame.

“Jesus _fucking_ —” he hisses, grappling for purchase on Rust’s shoulder, and Rust just smiles, nips along the underside of his jaw and curls his tongue around the lobe of Marty’s ear.

“Hold on,” he says, briefly disentangling himself to reach for the bedside drawer, coming back with a familiar blue bottle in hand. He drops it into the mess of sheets like an afterthought and slides down the bed, sucking little love bites into Marty’s chest and side as he goes, grazing his teeth over the jut of a hipbone and pressing an open-mouthed kiss to the inside of a thigh. He rises up on his knees and watches the line of Marty’s throat work as he swallows, laid out flat and yielding underneath him, before urging him to turn over on his stomach.

Marty silently maneuvers around until he’s spread out along the middle of the bed, cheek resting atop his folded hands. “You fixing to do what I think you’re fixing to do?” he asks, a little breathless, and the pop of the cap coming off a plastic bottle is his answer.

“Yep,” Rust murmurs, squeezing a dollop of lube onto his fingertips. His other hand comes back around to rest in the dip at the small of Marty’s back, idly massaging a thumb into the tension there. “Spread your legs a little bit, get that pillow up underneath you,” he says, waiting while Marty moves into a more comfortable position.

“Oh God,” Marty groans, closing his eyes and breathing harsh through his nose. He’s not throbbing hard yet but he has to keep from rutting against the mattress, aching down to the bone for more good friction.

“Mmmhm,” Rust hums to himself, dragging the flat of his hand down over Marty’s ass. “Gonna be cold at first, hold still—” and then he works one finger in up to the middle knuckle, keeping his other hand steady against Marty’s back when he flinches up hard.

He waits a moment and then pushes the first finger in the rest of the way, prompting something like a low keen to well up and rattle in the back of Marty’s throat.

“You alright?”

Marty’s sounding just on the upper side of wrecked when he answers. “As alright as I’ll ever be with another man’s hand up my ass, what the fuck do you think?”

“Thinkin’ that sound you just made, there’s something you haven’t been telling me.” Rust works another finger in without any preamble and watches the line of Marty’s back shudder and arch low, just enough to give him away.

“Oh _shit,”_ he says, drawling the words out into lazy, whiskey-honey syllables and crooking his fingers up at an angle. “You like getting fingered, Marty? Maggie and all those bimbos used to get you off with a finger jammed up your ass?”

“You better shut your mouth and get going,” Marty rasps out, pushing up a little against Rust’s hand as he works two fingers in and out. “We can—shit, god _damn_ —reminisce later.”

“Shoulda told me sooner,” Rust murmurs, scissoring around for a few more moments before working in his ring finger and pushing in up to the knuckle, feeling the tight ring of muscle stretch and contract. Marty presses his face into the mattress and moans low, strung out between pleasure and a thread of pain, and the throaty sound of it goes straight to Rust’s dick.

He fingers Marty open best he can—doesn’t know if it’s enough but he can’t wait anymore, can’t hold off—and pulls his fingers free without warning, wringing a gasp out of Marty at the sudden loss of contact.

“Up on your knees,” he says, wiping a hand across the sheet before pulling Marty up so he’s kneeling with his hands braced, dick hanging half-hard between his legs. “Better angle this first go-around.”

“I don’t wanna hear the fucking mechanics of it,” Marty says, face burning red-hot. “Just—come on, man.”

“Alright,” Rust says, voice hewn rough around the edges as he uncaps the lube and slicks up the hard length of himself, shuddering when his thumb swipes over the sensitive head. “Gotta be now, then.”

“Fuck, Rust,” Marty says, gasping a little when Rust gets a hand around his hip and kneels behind him in the spread between his calves. “Yeah, now, right now.”

Rust plants one hand against the small of Marty’s back, has the other hooked in the soft junction between his groin and thigh. He lines himself up and pushes inside, blowing out a harsh breath through his nose that matches up with the tight hitch stuttering in Marty’s chest.

It’s a slow burn at first and then he’s sliding home all at once, pulling Marty back to meet that first thrust halfway, hand skirting up over the planes of his back when his groin presses flush against the curve of his ass. The world goes a little soft around the edges and his body arcs like a bow over Marty, giving in to the slow heat curling up the column of his spine.

Rust isn’t big enough to write home about but Marty feels filled to the brim, doesn’t know if he can take it like this, doesn’t know how the fuck anybody does, and then Rust slides out and comes back in at a new angle and his knees nearly give out underneath him.

_“Move,”_ he gasps out, muscles jumping under Rust’s hands. “Move Rust, fuckin’ Christ, go, _go—_ ” and then Rust is pivoting forward and fucking into him deep, digging his fingers into the flesh of Marty’s hips hard enough that he knows he’ll be counting ten plum bruises burst into bloom like virgin violets there in the morning.

Rust falls into a fluid rhythm that he abides like anything else, another weatherworn rule and timeworn ritual, going through the motions like he’s driven by an instinct that’s been branded into him since the start. He follows the sounds Marty makes like guideposts, lets his body take him there, entrenched down deep in the enduring give-and-take.

“I’m gonna piss the fucking bed,” Marty groans, mindlessly rocking back against Rust now, whose rhythm has started to go jagged, fervent and helter-skelter as he slaps into Marty’s ass.

“Normal,” Rust rasps out, like he has to tear the word free from his throat, a bandage ripped off a fresh wound. “Just buildin’—don’t touch yourself, let it ride, let it hit you.”

There’s a molten pool of heat gathering in the pit of Marty’s abdomen, coming to a fine, numbing boil in the hollow of his pelvis, and it’s something good, something building him up and tearing him down in the same breath, and if Rust just hits that sweet spot one more time, maybe two, three, _four—_

For a moment he thinks he might be dying. White bursts behind his eyes and he’s coming like a freight train, the whole of it ricocheting and rocking like wildfire through his groin and thighs, and he’s never felt anything like it, slamming into him again and again without a clear end in sight.

Rust’s name is a litany on his tongue and his knees buckle beneath him, gone too weak to do anything but give in and fall. Rust collapses down against his back, damp curls wet between his shoulder blades, breathing run ragged but still not finished. He doesn’t speak now, can’t, just twists them both around even as Marty’s still shaking so they’re laying pressed front-to-back in the bed, gets a hand around the other man’s thigh and fucks back into him from behind.

It doesn’t take long after that. A handful of sharp thrusts and Rust lights up like a livewire, seizing up and bucking against Marty as the orgasm rips through him, the taut bowstring of him finally let go. He humps slow and sloppy as he rides it out, letting the bright pink heat roll like the moving tide over his foundations.

Sweat slicks hot between them and Rust bows his head to pant hard against Marty’s neck, loosening the death grip on his thigh to trail along the length of his side, feeling the skin tremble and twitch underneath his fingers. He pulls out and rolls over onto his back, feels Marty slowly turn over next to him so their arms are tangled up on the sheets.

“God damn,” Marty says to nobody in particular, and Rust only vaguely nods, reaching up to push some of the hair off his forehead.

“Dunno if we can ever do that again,” Marty murmurs after a few more moments, and when Rust opens his eyes he finds him staring up at the ceiling, hand thrown across his chest. “Got a grandbaby to watch grow up and you might damn near kill me before I make it to 55.”

“That good, huh?” Rust says, and Marty spits out a half-slurred string of swears.

“Shut your fuckin’ mouth,” he says with no real heat. “Your head’s big enough already, I ain’t saying anything else about it.”

“You were sure saying plenty before,” Rust says, twisting around to meet Marty’s gaze, and Marty just gently pushes his face away, back of his fingers sliding across Rust’s cheek.

“Treasure it, cause that’s all you’re getting,” he says, sitting up and taking Rust with him. There’s a brief moment where he gets that _look_ on his face, the one that maybe sometimes makes Rust’s heart stutter and miss a step, but it quietly ebbs away when Marty slaps his thigh and makes to stand on unsteady legs.

“Fuck the afterglow, man,” he says, wincing a little. “We both need a shower.”

Rust is surprised when Marty coaxes him under the hot spray but he doesn’t say anything, just steps into the shower and starts lathering up. Halfway through Marty drops the soap and looks fucking scandalized when he does it, eyeballing the spot where it came to a stop in the bottom of the tub between them. Rust only laughs, gently presses him up against the tile wall and kisses him under the warm water, soap be forgotten and damned.  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Considering my track record as The Fluffy Vanilla Domestic Redneck Detective Queen, you might imagine that this was hard as ever-loving hell to write in places. (Spoiler: it was.) I've never written anything as ~detailed as that big sex scene before, so here at the tail-end of it all I can honestly say that I feel like I've run the gauntlet. For everybody out there who writes this stuff on the regular: you are my hero and inspiration.
> 
> If I'm the first person to kick Marty out of his spot as The Reigning Top in this fandom, I sure hope I did the move some small ounce of justice. I know the dynamic pitched this way is a little strange to behold at first, but hey, maybe there's some benefit to trying new things. *cough _Marty_ cough*


	19. boot scoot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also known as; Save A Horse (Ride A Cowboy)

The night the rodeo circuit pulls into town Marty gets agitated, restless, like something’s got a knuckle wedged down deep in his brain, thumping an old neuron until it knocks loose and sparks back into life. He takes his Stetson down out of the closet and polishes his belt buckle, digs a well-worn pair of cowboy boots out of the guest room that Rust hasn’t laid eyes on in something just outside a decade. Tries his good ol’ boy voice back on for size and then steps easy into a muscle-memory swagger to match.

“You gonna break out a pair of leather chaps too?” Rust asks, watching as Marty buffs his belt to a high shine with the elbow of his flannel shirt. “Maybe some spurs, a Lone Ranger mask.”

“Only if you wanna play dirty,” Marty says, throwing Rust a flash of crooked smile. “I’ll be Butch, you can be Sundance—almost a shame you don’t have the Redford stache anymore.”

“Thinking I’ll pass,” Rust says, sinking down in the chair on the opposite side of Marty’s desk, eyeballing the array of effects spread out over stacked paperwork and case files. He picks up a braided leather bolo tie with a turquoise stone set in the middle, thumbs over the cool hammered metal and cuts his eyes back over to Marty.

“We going to a Texas cattle auction or PBR? You can’t wear this shit.”

“Course I can,” Marty says, setting his belt buckle down with a little too much force. “All the guys wear _this shit_. I’ll blend right in.”

Rust sets the bolo down and slouches back in his chair, kicking his feet up on the filing cabinet. “Says the man who wore a Floyd shirt into a gang-tapped biker bar.”

“Yeah, well this is different. I used to ride in the local circuit, I know all the old chutes and ladders. Besides,” Marty snorts, giving Rust a heavy onceover, “it ain’t like you got room to talk. I’m sure you’ll be the only one for a half-mile wearing khakis and a button-down.”

“Mmhmm,” Rust hums, swinging his legs back to the floor and strolling out of the room. “We’ll see about that.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Rust’s voice floats back down the hall, just loud enough to pick up as it echoes through the wall. “Means we’ll see.”  


* * *  


The following afternoon Marty walks into the bedroom on the hunt for a pair of thick socks and finds Rust perched at the foot of the bed, angling one long leg into a pair of blue jeans. He makes quick and deliberate work of sliding into them as Marty watches from the doorway, standing from the mattress and pulling them up over his hips in one fell swoop.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Marty says, appraising the dark denim where it’s all but painted on around Rust’s thighs. “Did you go out and buy these special for the occasion?”

Rust loops his belt around and lets it hang open while he tucks his undershirt it. “Told Shelley my size, she went ahead and picked them out. Her idea, after all.”

“You let _Shelley_ pick you out a pair of Wranglers?” Marty asks, barking out a laugh as he digs around in his sock drawer. “My God. Surprised she don’t have you dolled up like a rhinestone cowboy.”

“Tight as fuckin’ hell,” Rust says, zipping up and fastening the button. He does a little half-squat with a vague grimace pulled across his face, bottom lip just barely snared in his teeth. “Already can’t feel my balls.”

“Yeah,” Marty says, blowing out a sigh and letting his eyes drift a little southward. “That’s how you know they look good.”

“You an expert on the matter?” Rust asks, fingers steadily threading his belt together.

“Might be,” Marty tells him, taking his socks and shuffling toward the door. “Though I don’t reckon I paid much mind to these things until you showed up.”  
  
  
  


“Look at you, lone star,” Marty says, letting out a low whistle when Rust comes down the hall a few minutes later. “Fit like a goddamn glove. You don’t even ride and I’m gonna have to beat the buckle bunnies off you with a stick.”

Rust is leant up against the kitchen bar with one foot kicked out and crossed at the ankle, throat bobbing as he swallows a mouthful of coffee leftover from breakfast. He’s in his standard casual flannel but the fitted denim hugs his thighs and ass tighter than khaki chinos could ever dream, just wide enough at the cuff to pull down snug over his boots.

“How do you know I don’t ride?” he asks, watching Marty over the rim of his mug, eyes cast lazy.

“Please,” Marty snorts, experimentally tightening the notch on his belt before thinking better of it. “You ride grizzlies and moose up in Alaska? Last bullpen you saw the inside of had the likes of Geraci and Lutz stomping around.”

Rust sets his coffee down and braces his hands behind him against the counter. The sunlight coming in from the kitchen window hits him like a scimitar, cutting a sharp line of gold over his chest and neck. “Had a pony one time, back when I was a kid. Found her tied to a tire down in a little culvert off the road.”

Marty turns to nuke his own coffee in the microwave for a moment, punching the buttons in with his middle finger. “An abandoned pony? In Bumfuck, Alaska?”

“Yeah,” Rust says. “She was tame. Old and swaybacked, but I took her down to the meadow that spring and let her graze, fattened up pretty quick. Fashioned some kind of bridle and rode her bareback through the forest until winter.”

The microwave chimes and Marty takes his coffee out, blows against the steam rolling off the top. “What happened in the winter?”

“Pop killed her and we ate her,” Rust says, blinking once. “Couldn’t afford to feed her. I kept part of the hide, made a little hunting pouch out of it.”

“Do me a favor,” Marty says, stalling his cup to stare slightly open-mouthed at Rust. “When Lilah gets a little older and goes through one of them pony phases, don’t fucking tell that story. Just don’t do it.”

“Naw, Marty,” Rust says, pushing off the counter to palm the truck keys. “Suppose I’ll just tell the one where I spent a week clubbing seals in the north ‘til the snow ran red.”

“Jesus Christ,” Marty sighs, picking his hat up off the table before following Rust out the front door, boot heels clicking against the tile. “Tell the fucking pony story, then. Just leave out the part at the end where y’all ended up with a hundred pounds of horse steak.”  


* * *  


Even before they pull off the main road Rust can see trucks, campers, and livestock trailers set up in an endless sprawl outside the main arena for what looks like miles. The dirt lots are packed to the brim with country and city folk alike, some hauled in from as far as the swamps for a night of honest revelry, others already rubbing new blisters as unbroken boots gnaw steady through their ankles.

Animals bawl and snort in pens set up to and fro, swatting flies and dozing in the afternoon heat. The air smells like dust and sweat and saddle soap, tastes something like the inside of an old coke can full of dip spit. People hoot and holler and already have amateur piglet races running down in the empty retention pond, little makeshift food trailers set up with the promise of pulled pork sandwiches and crawfish boudin.

Marty breathes it all in and comes back up like he’s been invigorated with new life, already grinning fit to burst in this world of old toothless cowboys and horseshit. Rust’s nostrils flare slightly as he squints off into the late afternoon sky, steps hitching off-kilter until his skin and bones fall in steadier time with the pulse thrumming around them.

“Christ, I’d been missing this,” Marty says, touching the brim of his hat as an older man and woman stroll past arm-in-arm, done up fancy in starched denim and fringed suede. “Been too many years. Kinda feels like coming home in a weird way.”

“Can’t say I was ever really exposed to the lifestyle,” Rust says, letting Marty lead the gradual way toward the indoor arena. They stop outside a corral with a palomino mare hanging her head out over the rope, and when Rust holds a hand out palm-up she presses her nose into it, blowing out a huff of hot air at the empty offering.

“All that time in Texas and you never went to a rodeo?” Marty asks, reaching up to absently pat the horse’s neck while he cuts a look back at Rust. “Houston puts out some of the best shows in the country. You were right there at the heart of it.”

“Crash never had the time or alibi for it,” Rust says, lining his boots up with tracks left in the dust before them. “The kind of bronco I was riding—shit, you won’t be seeing any here tonight.”

“Y’know,” Marty says, “sometimes you go off being cryptic like that and part of me doesn’t even want to figure out what the fuck it is you’re talking about.”

“That’s fine,” Rust says, holding onto his own thigh as a long-legged brunette sways past, dark-rimmed eyes slapped up against him like hot coals. “Don’t care much for reminiscing about it these days anyhow.”

Marty glances over his shoulder as the woman disappears behind them, tongue folded down heavy in his bottom lip. “You see her looking at you?”

“Mmm,” Rust hums, staring straight ahead.

“Uh-huh,” Marty says, letting his shoulder bump into Rust’s as they step inside the inner arena. “Just let her keep on lookin’.”  


* * *  


Rust watches the bulls buck and throw bowlegged kids calling themselves cowboys with an interest that is neither keen nor removed. He catches himself ticking down from eight as each pair bursts out of the chute, half-listening as Marty prattles on about big names on the circuit like he’d just had a beer on their back porch the night before.

An old curiosity lingers at the back of his mind as he watches the riders snap through the air like ragdolls, waking a faint urge to press two fingers to the pulse hammering against the soft junction between their neck and ear. Gauge their fear, exhilaration, the familiar pounding drumbeat of bitter-hot adrenaline.

Coming at it from an abstract angle, the kids aren’t so different from who he used to be—who Crash was. Throwing themselves at The Job with reckless abandon, straddling the very fucking thing that could kill them with one stiff blow. Doing it willingly. Counting down life in a series of seconds, and despite it all, getting paid to put on a show.

The indoor events end early enough that the sky still has a touch of blush on its brow when they walk back out into the open air. Marty’s in high spirits—sucks in a deep pull off the cooling night, marvels at the sprawl laid out over the hard-packed earth like they’ve stepped onto the edge of a vast utopia.

“What should we do first?” he asks, hitching his fingers up in his pockets. He’s got his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, eyes bright despite the heavy shade cast over his face beneath his hat.

“Whatever you want,” Rust says, producing a cigarette and lighter from his shirt pocket. A solid month and some change of whittling down hasn’t gotten him home free but he can usually keep it roundabout eight smokes a day now, ten or twelve or maybe fifteen if they’re stuck in the car too long, but then by that point he sure as fuck ain’t counting.

Marty watches him light up and suck a long drag off, tilting his head back far enough that he’s almost looking down the bridge of his nose. “Whatever I want, you say?”

Rust takes his cigarette between two fingers and turns his head to blow out a stream of smoke. “Lead the way, cowboy.”

Judging by the setup spread out over the grass lot you’d never know the main event had taken place inside. Show horses in silver and turquoise-studded tack part through the crowd with ease, coats brushed and manes combed to a high glossy sheen. Somebody hauled in a mechanical bull on a trailer and has it set up under spotlights, running strong and flinging riders across the cushioned runners with the help of a couple gas generators. A few rusty roundpens have been brought in and set up for the occasion, keeping a small herd of stout black cows at bay for the time being. A hand-painted sign hanging off the gate reads _Wild Cow Milking Contest—no entry fee._        

“You won’t catch me doing that shit,” Marty says, throwing a nod toward the wild cows as they walk past. “Reason it’s free is because no sober soul ever wants to do it.”

“Thought you knew your way around a wild set of big tits,” Rust says, only cracking a splinter of a smile when Marty pops him in the side with the back of his hand.

“Yeah asshole, well these girls will kick your fuckin’ teeth in once they’ve got you in the dirt. They’ll stomp you harder than some of the bulls will.”

“Not altogether different from real life,” Rust says, tipping his head back to survey the menu on the side of the food truck they step into line behind. “Man comes at a woman like that, he might better be prepared to get grazed.”

“I was talking about wild heifers,” Marty mutters, fishing around for his wallet, and his mouth presses into a thin line for a moment before softening again. “Fuck,” he blows out on an exhale, staring hard at the menu he’s not reading. “Might be because he deserved it.”  
  


* * *  


Two tall beers and a few long pulls off one of Rust’s later, Marty starts eyeballing the mechanical bull like he’s squaring up for a fight.

“C’mon over here so we can watch for a second,” he tells Rust, ambling over to where the crowd stands gathered around the bull’s makeshift platform. The generators are still running but somebody’s cranked up the bass on some kind of hard-thumping country rock, furnishing riders with a roaring soundtrack as they get ripped around and flung through the air. The guy operating the thing is wearing black jeans and a grimy wifebeater, one gold tooth winking whenever he manages to throw somebody off into the night.

They watch one young man plant hard on his shoulder against the bedraggled safety mat while a collective _oooh_ rises up from the spectators. The kid gets up and walks away on his own steam but favors his left arm and shoulder, keeping that side of his torso held stiff as he slides off the platform.

“Any takers?” the operator yells, jimmying his joystick so the riderless bull whirs around in a handful of three-sixties that look like they’d sling the fillings slam out of your mouth.

“I’m up!” Marty yells, cutting his hand through the air, and the operator touches two fingers to his temple in a jaunty salute.

“You’re gonna kill yourself,” Rust says, making a quiet study of how Marty flexes the fingers of his right hand in anticipation. “Probably break a fucking hip, and then what am I supposed to do with you?”

“The hell I will, this is nothing compared to the real thing.” Marty hikes his jeans up and lets his weight fall back heavy on one hip, coolly slipping off his bolo and setting his hat atop Rust’s head before flicking the brim. “You forget I used to make a living off bulls in college. ‘Bout to show these kids how it’s done.”

“About to show your ass, but go right ahead.”

Rust leans against the surrounding platform and watches Marty step up, lacing his arms in through the hollow metal bars. He leaves the hat on his head but pushes the brim back a pinch, peering up at the moths fluttering around the raised spotlights, trying not to look too closely at how they leave glowing trails of ochre across the blue-black night.

“What level we cutting it out at?” the operator hollers, making the bull buck once as Marty walks across the platform. “You look about a four outta nine.”

“No need,” Marty calls back, patting the spotted cowhide wrapped around the machine. “Keep going until you throw me—if you can.”

Marty swings up on the mechanical bull with an ease that seems to draw the undivided attention of the crowd. His knees dig in at angle while he gets his right hand up under the leather strap and locks it in tight, lets his left hover out in the open air above his thigh. Looks to the operator and nods once, giving the go-ahead. Somebody flips the music to the next song and as soon as the bass drops in they’re off.

The operator seems to be starting slow, working his way up from level one and holding it there in a prolonged joke of a tease. Marty just shakes his head as he spins in lazy circles and dips forward in molasses-slow seesaws, bites his cheek around a wry grin but doesn’t let his grip falter.

“You thinking about taking a turn, cowboy?” a voice breaks in from Rust’s left, and when he turns to appraise the speaker he finds the same pair of coal-dark eyes that had been watching him earlier in the evening, rimmed heavy with flourishes of black and silver. She isn’t alone now, though, and has a freckled blonde with a candy-pink painted mouth in tow.

“Naw,” Rust says, blinking at them once and turning his attention back to Marty as the operator dials up from two to three and starts making sharper jerks on the joystick. “Not really my kind of gig.”

“What, you just come here for the food and the livestock?” she asks, hooking an arm around the metal bar as her eyes flicker down and back up. “Legs like that, there’s no way you don’t ride.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, ladies,” he deadpans, listening to Marty let out a little hoot as the bull bucks hard and fast from a four to a solid five. “I’m guessin’ you must come here for the romantic atmosphere.”

They both laugh and the blonde steps around until she’s on Rust’s other side, so freckled that even her eyelids and hands are dusted over. She pops her hip out as she leans forward against the railing, close enough that Rust can feel the warmth of it against his thigh. “Could be, if you’re feeling romantic,” she says over the music. “Kinda looks like the rugged Robert Redford type, doesn’t he?”

“Robbie without the stache, yeah,” the brunette says, eyes skirting over the planes of Rust’s face as he fumbles for his smokes. “Or the Marlboro man.”

“Only ever smoked Camels,” Rust mumbles around a cigarette, lighting up without their regards, though he tips his head back to blow smoke into the air as a mild courtesy. He returns the pack to his shirt pocket without any offering and then trains his sights back on Marty.

Now four seconds into a good level six, he’s busy leaning and working his thighs to stay firmly seated, counteracting the wild twists and bucks with a poised and calculated sense of balance Rust can’t ever remember seeing. The girls are busy watching him now, too, eyes trained steady on the bull as the operator cranks up to seven and the music picks up a ragged-fast rhythm to match.

“This old guy’s pretty good,” the blonde says, scoffing and sticking out a thoughtful bottom lip. “They would’ve long since thrown off any greenhorn over age thirteen. Grandpa up there must be a seasoned rider.”

Rust makes a turn tempered accidental and blows out a stream of smoke that hits her right in the face, casually tapping ash down between his feet. “Yeah," he says, watching her cough through the haze with a little shrug that looks like _shit, my bad_. "I guess he is."

Marty’s being torn and ripped through the air now but holds on fast for the good fight, staying seated even as the operator keeps him an extra round in seven before finally breaking into an eight. Rust watches close and manages to catch sight of Marty’s right knee as it slips against the hide when the bull leans hard to the side, and three seconds shy of hitting a high nine his grip falters and he’s flung free into the air. He manages to land on one foot before stumbling back and falling flat on his ass, and there’s a brief lull of silence before the crowd gathered around the platform breaks into cheering applause.

“You’re the first fucker outside the professional arena to stay seated that far into an eight for two nights running,” the operator crows, walking over to pull Marty up off the mat. “Ain’t no way you’ve never done this before, man, because that was a goddamn _ride._ ”

“Oh, I’ve had better,” Marty laughs, dusting his jeans off and shaking the operator’s hand, then briefly waving to the crowd as he walks down off the platform. Back on hard ground he spots Rust standing between the two girls, leant back against the railing, and even from here the rigid line of his shoulders speaks wonders.

“So we were wondering if you’d wanna get out of here, maybe go get some drinks somewhere,” the brunette is saying as Marty walks up, one of her hands resting lightly on the edge of Rust’s elbow. Her eyes drag heavy up his arm, over the black lines of his tattoo and shoulder until she hits his neck.

“I prefer to keep company with somebody who has a few more years under their belt,” Rust says, catching Marty’s eye over the top of her head.

“I don’t know about that,” the blonde says, flipping her hair over one shoulder. “You look like you’d have some fun once you loosened up a little. I think you should come with.”

“You wanna repeat that, darlin’?” Marty asks as he comes around into view, eyebrows pitched aloft. “Maybe I can tag along for the ride, chaperone, since y’all clearly don’t know what the hell you’re doing.”

“Uh—I’m sorry?” the brunette says, flicking her eyes in his direction as recognition dawns on her face. “That was a great ride you just had, but we’re not—”

“ _Not_ taking this one home, I can tell you that much,” Marty cuts in, stepping in front of her to brace his fingers around Rust’s hip. “Afraid he’s got prior arrangements.”

“Oh my God,” the blonde says, laughing behind her hand with her painted lips parted into a perfect _o_. “You’re not—he’s your—?”

“All mine,” Marty says, squaring his jaw up around a tight smile as he pulls his hat off Rust and levels it over his eyes. “Now if you’ll excuse us.”

“Been a pleasure, ladies,” Rust calls over one shoulder, letting Marty steer him away into the crowd as the girls stand speechless and rooted to the spot behind them.

“Pretty good ride you had up there,” he says when they get a good distance away, lips quirked up at the corners as he tugs Marty’s bolo from a pocket and drops it back into his hand. “Even had the ladies impressed.”

“Wasn’t a bad run,” Marty says, dropping his hand from Rust’s hip to clap it against the back of his thigh. He leans in close mid-step, speaks just loud enough for the words to stay caught between them. “But it ain’t nothing compared to the ride I’m taking you on later.”  


* * *  


The night starts burning down to the wick not long past ten, animals half-dozing in their pens and merrymakers left buzzed and weary after a long day spent in the saddle or out under the sun. Marty works his way through another two tall beers and a funnel cake for good measure, the latter of which he tries feeding to Rust with sugar-dusted fingers.

“Last bite,” he says, holding it pinched between a thumb and forefinger like he’s fixing to feed a baby bird, and Rust only blinks at the morsel of fried dessert and sighs.

“You know I don’t make a point to eat this shit,” he says, though he opens up and lets Marty pop it into his mouth, bottom lip catching a little on the other man’s thumb as he pulls away.

“I’ll never know why you have such a personal vendetta against sugar,” Marty says, dumping the empty paper plate into a trashcan and brushing his hands together. “You get some kinda strung-out sex glow after you’ve had some, and that sure as hell ain’t something I see fit to complain about.”

“Trying to make a better effort of keeping my vices in check,” Rust says, thumbing at the corner of his mouth. “Alcohol, nicotine, caffeine. Sugar can turn into a chemical dependency just the same as the rest of it.”

Marty shakes his head like the mere idea plagues him at some deep-seated level, but before he can open his mouth he stops short at the edges of a gathered crowd, trying to pick out the words being called over the loudspeaker.

“Hold up,” he says, straining to hear. “Did they just say?—oh shit, Rust, there’s gonna be a line dance. The fuckin’ Boot Scoot.”

“What?” Rust asks, word fumbled out of his mouth, but Marty is already gone and wading through the crowd to join the group congregated on the hard linoleum dance floor. He makes quick work of getting into position, a lot steadier on his feet than four beers might otherwise suggest, and nods at the man and woman on either side of him before throwing a crooked grin in Rust’s direction.

Brooks & Dunn start up over the loudspeaker and Rust camps out at the far side of the dance floor, tries to forget the number of cigarettes left in his pack in favor of remembering the last time he might’ve heard this fucking song. Must have been something like fifteen years ago now, back when Maggie and Marty were still dragging him out on their well-meaning socialization experiments every other weekend. Before Laurie, long before 2002. Being pulled out onto the floor by soft-handed women, the kind that were always simultaneously plain and pretty, twirling them around and around out of an obligation to be whatever it was he— _wasn’t._

Marty’s still boot scootin’ with the best of them, going through the simple steps with a loose-limbed ease. He’s always proven himself a decent enough dancer, as considerate and giving on the floor as he is in bed, never at a loss for where to put his hands or give and take a little reign as needed.

As the song winds down and fades out, the DJ drawls out a new call for a couples’ dance and Marty breaks out of formation, catches hold of Rust’s gaze and follows it like a lead rope until they’re standing toe-to-toe in the grass.

“You ready to hit the road?” Rust says, idly fingering the key ring hanging off his belt loop.

“Dunno,” Marty says, looking elsewhere, like the night’s suddenly thrown a bumper up around Rust’s face. His skin is flushed, already tinged pink by the Louisiana sun though something more feverish might lie deeper underneath. “I was thinking—well, they’re about to start up a new dance. Thought we could stick around for one more. You and me, y’know.”

Rust’s eyes dip shut, spots of color dancing behind his lids like little pink and green moths. “Marty,” he says, and all the moisture feels like it’s been sucked out of his mouth. “Maybe you’ve had a few too many.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Marty says, palming the back of his neck as the music starts up behind them. “I’m a little buzzed maybe, nothing serious enough for me to not know what the fuck I’m saying.”

Rust opens his eyes again, meets Marty’s, shades of blue layered on top of blue. “What’re you saying, then?”

“Sayin’ I know you’re a damn good dancer,” Marty says, breathing out the words like a confession. The muscle in his jaw tenses and hops before unfurling into something softer, a tight-fisted rosebud opened up to the sun. “Christ, Rust—I’m saying I want you to get your ass out here and go one time around with me, alright?”

Rust’s mouth barely moves when he speaks. “You’re aware that people are going to stare.”

“Fuck people,” Marty says, taking Rust’s hand and pressing a thumb into his palm. “Course they’re gonna stare, fine a piece as you are. And I hope those girls are watching, too.”

They make it out onto the edge of the dance floor, standing there with their hands held up in a momentary deadlock. Eyes have already swerved fast in their direction but the music keeps playing and people keep dancing, the night rolls onward and the earth keeps spinning.

“Who’s leading?” Marty croaks out, and Rust immediately gets a hand around his waist, threads their fingers together and pulls them both headlong into the rhythm.

“We’re taking turns, asshole,” Marty says, and Rust doesn’t say anything, only holds tighter onto Marty and spins faster.  


* * *  


The far-flung dirt parking lot is dark when they head back for the truck, quiet save for the distant sound of ongoing festivities and the occasional crunch of gravel underfoot. Both men are quiet, sunk down in the weatherworn kind of silence that might’ve always been there between them, though it’s bowed in around the middle now, softened into something more comfortable that doesn’t strum sharp when you touch it.

When they get within sight of the truck Marty’s voice breaks loose, pitched low against the night air.

“Had a good time today,” he says. “Gonna have to treat Shelley sometime for giving us those tickets—I know they weren’t anything cheap.”

“Mmmhm,” Rust says, slowing as they come up on the red Ford. “Even though you had to ride in and fight off my many suitors.”

“Shit, they were so wet for you man,” Marty says, barking out a laugh. The echo fades off and the air around them charges up for a second, hot enough to spark as their eyes meet through the dim light. “Speaking of which,” Marty growls, getting a handful of Rust’s flannel, “that reminds me—”

His mouth crashes into Rust’s hard enough to bruise and they’re slamming back against the passenger side of the truck, rough enough that Rust’s head cracks into the glass.

“Never understand how you’re such a fucking pussy magnet,” Marty says, jamming a thigh into the spread between Rust’s legs and working open the top button of his jeans. “All that broodin’ stone-faced shit you do—look like a piece of driftwood half the time and the girls still come running to hump your fucking leg.”

“Got you doing the same thing, don’t it?” Rust asks, tipping his head back against the window as Marty pulls the collar of his shirt down to mouth around the junction between his neck and shoulder, sucking hard on the long line of his neck.

“Boy,” Marty says, jerking Rust’s zipper down and shoving past the waistband of his underwear, swallowing Rust’s little gasp in a kiss when he palms the hard length of him. “You don’t even know the half of it.”

   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _The Worldly Adventures of Rust & Marty_ continue! I know these updates sometimes tend to read like romcoms set in an alternate universe (deep sigh), but I've got a real hankering for expanding the boys' world and considering where this story is headed in the next chapter...well, let's just say they needed one last good night out. Take from that what you will, folks. 
> 
> As a final note, I totally recommend everybody go listen to "Boot Scootin' Boogie" by Brooks & Dunn and then "Ain't Going Down (Til the Sun Comes Up)" by Garth Brooks if you've never done so. Nothing special or particularly meaningful, but I do like to imagine they were the songs playing while Rust and Marty were out on the dance floor.


	20. red sky at morning

Rising early, Rust unfolds himself out of bed while Marty snuffles in his sleep and pulls on a pair of sweats, gets coffee going in the kitchen and finds Ghost sprawled out along the back of the recliner. He runs his fingers down her spine and receives a feeble meow for his efforts, watching as her body curls and falls like a wave under the weight of his hand.

The newspaper on the driveway is damp with dew when he picks it up, still untouched by the warm breath of coming day. It’s two weeks deep into September now and the air is cooler than usual, just now starting to crisp and tighten around the edges even though midday’s arrival will burn away any lingering thoughts of autumn. The songbirds cry and call out to one another overhead as he pads barefoot up the drive, ringing in the dawning light of a blood-red Cajun sun.

Rust turns before he gets to the front door and looks out over it all, pulling the swathe of pink-flushed sky down into his lungs. It burns there, a breath of nicotine or ammonia held too long, leaves the taste of something bitter-metallic on his tongue akin to old pennies scraped out of the bottom of a wishing fountain.

The birdsong momentarily dies when he walks inside, drowned out by a sputtering cough as a truck cranks over and backfires down the street.

 

* * *  
  


“What you got planned for today?” Marty asks as he throws the newspaper down on the couch before sinking in beside it, coffee already brought halfway to his mouth. He hasn’t smoothed his hair down yet and a tuft above his left ear sticks out in a silver cowlick. Rust stares at it while Marty clicks on the television and fumbles around for his reading glasses, fighting the urge to cross the room and press it back into place with two fingers.

“Somebody around here needs to buy food,” he says, opening the refrigerator and pulling out the last three eggs. “Guess I’ll make a list, pick up a few things at the grocery.”

Marty licks a finger and flips between newspaper pages. “Only thing I really had planned was squaring up the yard, so if you wanna get some shrimp and sausage I can throw together some jambalaya tonight.” He drops the paper and looks at Rust over the tops of his glasses, brows stretching toward his hairline. “You want that hot shit in it, though, we’re putting it on the side. Nearly killed me the last time.”

Rust digs around for a pen and paper and scrawls a few things down. “What else?”

“I don’t know. Shaving cream, probably. Some of that good cheese you like. How’s the cat rations holding up?”

Rust walks into the laundry room and checks the kibble bag, finds it three-fourths full and deems that plenty enough to keep them going until the next grocery run. When he bends down to gauge the bag of fresh litter he stops short, withdraws his hand and stands back up at his full height, eyes cast downward in the direction of the litter box.

“Where’s the cat?” he asks when he walks back into the living room, eyes whetted sharp. “Where’s Ghost?”

“What, why?” Marty asks, folding the newspaper and hitting mute on the remote, cutting out the cheering audience from a live morning show. “She was just over—oh shit.”

The cat is sprawled haphazard in the corner behind the end table now, sides billowing out as she pants shallow through her teeth. White foam bubbles up from her nose and mouth in a thick froth and flecks along the tips of her whiskers.

“God damn it,” Rust says, pressing his lips into a hard line as he kneels down in front of her. “Go find the cat carrier or a fucking pillowcase and look up the emergency vet’s number. There’s blood all in the litter box. We gotta take her in.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“Do you keep rat poison in your home?” the vet asks, tapping a nail against the stethoscope hanging around her neck. One of her eyelids droops and Rust can’t quite focus on dividing his attention between both eyes, gaze locked steady on the hooded one.

“No,” he says, “but we let her out during day when we’re home. Stays inside at night.”

“Uh huh,” she says, like that’s the last letter she needed for the Sunday crossword. “I see this happen more often than you’d think in indoor-outdoor dwellers, especially in residential areas. People lace food with rodenticides and leave it outside—any animal that stumbles upon it ends up taking a bite, not just the intended rats and vermin.”

“Anticoagulant poisoning,” Rust says, leaning forward to brace his elbows against his knees. The examination room is small, chilled, and if he pressed the tip of his tongue to the striped-beige wallpaper he knows it’d taste like baking soda and old piss. “She was bleeding internally.”

“Yes, and you did well to bring her in so quickly. Another couple hours and it would’ve been too late.” The vet’s rubber shoes squeak against the tile as she shifts her weight around, shuffling through papers on a clipboard. _Too late_. A standard sympathy, then, tied to The Job. Rust wonders how many times she’s said it inside these four walls, if she can recite the words in her sleep. _Too late. Too late._

“We gave her activated charcoal to soak up anything left in her intestines and started her in on the necessary Vitamin K treatment and IV fluids,” she goes on. “You’ll have to continue that when she goes home, daily supplements and whatnot.”

“How long do you need to keep her here?” Rust asks, and then feels the skin stretched over his face tighten up a little bit, an echo of leftover muscle memory. “Is there a chance she could still pass in the meantime?”

“Two or three days, at least until she’s stable and improving again. We were fortunately able to head it off pretty early so I’d say she’s in the clear for now.” The vet reaches up, fingers her stethoscope again. A habit, but not a nervous one. “I’d keep her inside for a while when you get her back home, though. You said ‘we’ before, so I assume you live with somebody? Wife, kids?”

“Marty,” Rust says, staring at a glass jar of cotton balls sitting by the sink. “The man who came in with me before. My partner.”

“Tell him the same about keeping her indoors,” she says, tone held just as even as before. “I’ll have a prescription and dietary regimen written out when you take her home.”

Rust climbs to his feet and picks up the empty carrier in one hand, holds out the other in an offering. “Appreciate the help, doctor.”

“Pleasure’s mine,” she says, taking his hand before watching him move toward the door that leads back out to the lobby. “Ghost is in good hands here—I wouldn’t worry, but we’ll be in touch if anything changes. And Mr. Cohle?”

Rust turns, face wiped blank enough to sketch in his expression.

“Maybe ask around the neighborhood, put your radar out. I don’t like to scare folks, but sometimes people do this kind of thing on purpose.”

“Yeah,” Rust says, blinking at her from under heavy-drawn lids. “They do.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Marty’s ten paces from the door when Rust walks back out into the late morning, jaw already locked up as he catches sight of the empty carrier.

“What’s the word?” he asks, slipping his phone back into his pocket as they trail through the small parking lot. “Fuck, I’m sorry—the Lafferty woman’s called me six times in the past hour about that son of hers who ran off with the nanny. Finally picked up thinking I could explain the situation, tell her to call back later, and of course that was a goddamn mistake.”

“S’alright,” Rust says, squinting in the brightness bouncing off the hood of the car. “She’s gonna be fine, most likely, just needs to stay a few days. Rat poison is what did it—anticoagulant. Makes you start bleeding out from the inside.”

“Rat poison?” Marty repeats, coaxing the cat carrier from Rust’s fingers and stowing it in the trunk of the Cadillac. “Jesus, you think she got into something outside?”

“Could be,” Rust says over the roof of the car, looking past Marty into the distant tree line. “Vet mentioned something about people doing this shit on purpose.”

“Don’t see why they would,” Marty says, folding his hands atop the sun-warmed metal. “We keep to ourselves for the most part. Cat’s not out there going wild, killing chickens and terrorizing livestock.”

“Dunno,” Rust says. “Two guys living together like we are, showing up in news last year for pulling the sheet off Childress. People find their reasons to do shit, Marty. Doesn’t mean they’re good ones.”

“I think we might need to sleep on this a night or two before you start probing the neighbors,” Marty says, dropping himself down into the driver’s seat. “People put vermin poison out all the time not thinking about pets finding it. I’m not saying it _wasn’t_ a direct hit, but there’s probably a better chance it wasn’t.”

“Yeah,” Rust says a little blandly, opening his car door and catching a wet slick of color from the corner of his eye. “Maybe.”

They turn out of the lot with the empty cat carrier sliding around in the trunk. Rust doesn’t mention the way the oil spot on the asphalt flashed in a crude spiral, glinting like a dirty rainbow when the sun hit it from the side.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


They end up going through the grocery store together, loading up the cart with jambalaya fixings that Marty ticks off one by one on his phone and then whatever else seems necessary for the next two weeks of survival. Thick-sliced American and provolone cheese from the deli, reduced fat mayo, two cartons of eggs, a box of instant pancake mix. Green tea bags. A packet of meatloaf seasoning. Hot sauce, a loaf of pumpernickel, and a half-gallon of Neapolitan ice cream that Rust will habitually divide by only ever eating the strawberry.

“Bay leaves,” Marty says, looking up from his phone and throwing a wary glance at the spices and seasoning aisle while Rust sets a pound of shrimp next to the sausage. “ _Three_ bay leaves it calls for. You think we really need that shit? I’d sooner throw in a handful of grass clippings, it’d probably taste about the same.”

“Maybe I’ll get you a spice rack for Christmas,” Rust says, pulling the buggy down the nearest aisle. “Teach you the finer points of food flavoring outside butter and salt.”

“Pouring Crystal on everything you put in your mouth doesn’t make you a flavor _connoisseur,_ ” Marty snorts, pulling a jar of sweet gherkins off the shelf. “Don’t even know how you can taste the fucking stratosphere when you’ve likely burned all the buds off your tongue.”

“No correlation,” Rust says, eyes scanning over the shelves. “We need white or brown rice?”

“White, but it says you can substitute. Whichever one you want, I don’t care either way. They’re always saying how brown is better for you.”

Rust throws a bag of white rice into the cart and pulls it around to the next aisle, finds himself standing parallel with a long wall of flour and sugar bags. Somebody’s busted a sack of confectioner and abandoned it on one of the lower shelves, leaving a mound of fine white powder spilling out onto the floor. He stops to stare at it and sniffs hard on impulse.

“I notice you won’t actually push the cart,” Marty says from his shoulder, not bothering to look down at the sugar. If he did he’d only see it for what it was—an inconvenient mess. A waste. “You only ever steer it from the front.”

“You hone in on the funniest shit, Marty,” Rust says, talking careful around the soft ache in his teeth. He moves slow down the aisle, leaving the bright white behind them. “A man’s gotta set some standards for himself.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


They take turns mowing the lawn these days, trading off Saturdays back and forth in a wordless covenant, one pulling up weeds and running the edger while the other walks in a damp green path behind the push mower. Maybe there’s a bigger metaphor in there somewhere, some kind of dirty joke you’ve known for as long as you can remember, but then again, maybe there’s not.

This weekend it’s Marty’s turn. He waits until the sun begins to dip deeper in the western sky—maybe an hour short of sunset, when the heat doesn’t beat down on you like a brick—before walking out to the garage to put on his yard shoes. The crickets and cicadas have already started in for the evening when he cranks the mower, cutting out and steadily fading back in when they learn to sing in time with the blades.

Rust cuffs his jeans around his ankles for the occasion, walks barefoot along the back fence as he snags weeds and loose sticks and sweats through his wifebeater, gradually working his way up front to the paltry flowerbeds and patch of dirt surrounding a young oak.

He’s rising from pulling a string of crab grass up near the mailbox when something in the street catches his eye. It’s a good fifteen yards from where he stands but already tastes like spit-damp paper and smoke from a distance.

He leaves the black bag full of weeds at the edge of the driveway and walks along the gutter until he’s looking down at the contents of what looks like somebody’s ashtray overturned in the road. Eleven cigarette butts sucked down to the filter, a smattering of grey that’s mostly been blown away by now. A single pull tab from a soda can that throws off a glint of orange coming in off the sinking sun. Aluminum and ash.

The mess isn’t far from the center line dividing the road, most likely means the driver dumped out their door facing further down the street. Rust looks to where Marty’s mowing the side yard now, blinks once, and walks back toward the house. Leaves the black trash bag where he left it and flags the other man down with one sharp wave of his hand.

“What?” Marty asks, running the back of an arm across his forehead when the mower cuts out. “I’m almost done.”

“Have you seen anybody parked out front?” Rust asks. “In the street, maybe a house or two down. Facing away from the house.”

“Can’t think of anything I’ve noticed. Why?”

Rust breathes in deep through his nose, fingers hitched up around his hips. “Can’t really say for certain. Something feels—off. Been like that all day.” He makes a gesture down by his side like he’s trying to thump the dusk and gauge its ripeness. “Air’s not right.”

Marty’s got his mouth screwed up, eyes gone a shade harder than they were before. “Listen, are you seeing shit? More than usual?” He reaches around to press a fist into the small of his back and leans into a memory. “You were all stove up in the car earlier when we left the vet, had your face set like how you’d get way back when. Telling me to _pull over, Marty, the clouds are meltin’ off the fucking horizon_.”

“It’s not like that,” Rust says, even though it probably is. “This is more specific, like I’m seeing signs. Warnings.”

“You think stress can aggravate it—your head, I mean? Maybe the cat stoked shit up worse than it already is. Causing you to have an episode or something.”

Rust shakes his head, squints off into the sun as it touches down on the seam between earth and sky. “Ghost might have something to do with it,” he says. “Like she’s part of the bigger picture.”

“Why don’t you head on inside, drink some ice water,” Marty says, turning to crank the lawnmower back up. “I’ll finish up out here and then we can just fuck off for the rest of the night. Order a pizza or something, save the stew for tomorrow.”

Rust turns and walks down the driveway to retrieve the dropped trash bag, stands at the edge of the road and looks in either direction as the streetlights shudder and flicker to life. The sky isn’t angry-dark but the promise of an evening shower hangs soft in the air, teasing out the smell of damp ozone from the earth. He watches a gust of wind roll the litter of cigarette butts across the pavement, silently counts down from ten, and then pads back up to the house.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Rust is coming out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam when Marty breezes down the hall, catching a handful of towel-clad ass with the flat of his hand as he walks past.

“Put some pants on,” he says as he disappears into the bedroom, leaving the smell of wet grass and gasoline on the air behind him. “I ordered the pizza and it’ll probably be here before I’m out of the shower and decent, so you’re gonna have to answer the door and tip the guy. Started raining a few minutes ago, dunno how long he’ll take to get here.”

Rust follows him into the bedroom and drops his towel at the foot of the bed to dig around in the dresser, pulling out a pair of sweats and an old t-shirt, probably one of Marty’s judging by the faded logo stretched across the chest. When he straightens up Marty’s holding out a five dollar bill between two fingers, one eyebrow arched up as his gaze slides over six feet of shower-damp skin.

“Wouldn’t normally complain but I’m filthy and thinking awfully hard about that supreme pizza,” he says, grinning as Rust plucks the money out of his hand. “But _later—_ ”

“ _Later_ you’re answering all thirty fuckin’ emails you let pile up in your inbox last week, and then we’re sitting down and going through case notes for Lafferty and Shanks before they drop us off the job.”

“Love when you talk dirty to me,” Marty says with a sigh, walking toward the bathroom with a wad of clean clothes in hand. He starts up the shower and pulls a washcloth off the rack behind the toilet, peeking back around the door as Rust walks past with his notebook under one arm. “Sure would be nice if I got half as much action as that ledger.”

“Bet it would,” Rust says from the other end of the hall, just loud enough to catch. “Maybe if you made yourself as useful.”

Marty barks out a laugh before shutting the bathroom door, and Rust folds himself down onto the couch with a pen in hand, only shakes his head when he hears the shampoo bottle and a muffled ream of swears clatter to the bottom of the tub.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“Gonna be in the office,” Marty calls out, poking an arm through his t-shirt and pulling it over his head as he shuffles down the hall. “Might as well get started on these emails while the pizza gets shipped in via the fuckin’ pony express.”

Rust looks up from his notebook a few moments later, pen stalling out over the spiraling oil slick he’d caught in his peripherals in the vet’s parking lot. The rest of the page is covered in a staggered collection of underlined notes and crosshatched lines, pinched cigarette butts and a line of verse reeled in from a cold morning spent out on the Alaskan bay.

 

   
  


“Gonna have to head back in early, boy,” Travis had said, letting ash from his cigarette flutter down to the bottom of the skiff. “Storm’s getting her bearings up underneath her. Won’t wanna be out here when the rain hits.”

The dawning sky was all light pitched through rose-tinted glass, drenching the sea in shades of crimson and the kind of orange that made Rust’s mouth water with the promise of something sour-sweet. “How do you know a storm’s comin?” he’d asked, eight years old and already sorting out the fishing net draped over his knees with a keenness most grown men couldn’t lay claim to. “I don’t hardly see any clouds.”

Travis took his cigarette between two fingers and made as if to draw over the sky, brushing out long strokes across the bloody horizon. “There’s an old saying,” he said. “Mariner’s rhyme. Goes 'red sky at morning, shepherd take warning.'”

Rust squinted up at his father, small fingers keeping steady at their work. “What’s that mean?”

“Means a storm’s coming up from the west,” Travis said, blowing a stream of pink smoke into the air. “Means you need to mind your flock.”

 

   
  


“Just heard a car pull up out front,” Marty yells from the office, still hunched over in front of his laptop. “About to hang it up in here, be out in a second.”

Rust sets his notebook aside and pulls himself to his feet, palming the five dollar bill off the coffee table. “Is it the delivery guy?” he asks, slanting the question over his shoulder. The door is angled away from the street, but the office window overlooks the front yard and a view that stretches clear down to the corner.

Marty glances to his right, peers through the foggy glass and spots an empty truck with a lit-up delivery sign idling at the curb under a misting sheet of rain. “Yeah, go ahead and get the door,” he says, pecking out a few more words on the keyboard. He feels _why?_ balancing heavy on the tip of his tongue when a chill claws up the notched column of his spine, dragging old dread like a dead cat behind it. The chime of the doorbell rings across the house and yellow fear bursts like an overripe fruit at the base of his skull, bleeds hot out across his senses in a syrupy poison.

The echo fades through the walls and Marty’s eyes drag back up to the windowpane, everything around him suddenly gone too-hard, too-bright, color and shape honed sharp enough to split soft skin wide. Sound cuts out and he can’t fucking hear anything outside the roar of blood inside his own ears because there’s a warped spiral drawn on the glass, there, right there, rendered in the beaded condensation with nothing more than the tip of a forefinger.

“Rust,” he tries to say.

Tries, because that’s when the first shot goes off.

  
  
  


Rust has the front door halfway open when it occurs to him that he’s made a mistake.

The delivery driver and his white pizza box are laid out flat on the front walkway, soaking up rainwater and leaking out something that shines ruby-dark at his temple. Rust immediately tries to slam the door back into place but there’s a boot stuck fast in the jamb, and whatever stands behind it on the other side shoulders inside with a strength he hasn’t encountered before or since he was lifted off the dirt floor of the throne room.

He stumbles back with his hands still wrapped around the edge of the door, thinks about a thousand things inside the beat of half a second. About his loaded gun in the bedroom drawer, his knife on the kitchen counter; yellow rags a swirling void fluid blackness and then, very clearly, about Marty.

A gun goes off, the door splinters, and Rust is acutely aware of his shoulder lighting up and splintering along with it.

His arm drops like deadweight and he staggers back against the wall, hunches over at the waist and lunges across the room as far away from the hallway as he can get. The gunman is inside now, dropped from a hand manifested out of the ether, whites of his eyes rolling wild around two dead stars as black as the night.

Rust grits his teeth against the red-hot agony bolting down his arm, gets his good hand around the table lamp and knocks the shade away as he yanks the cord out of the wall. The motherfucker hasn’t moved, only stands there with his sights lined down the barrel of the gun, and Rust doesn’t wait for fire, just dives forward and swings the heavy base of the lamp around with the sole aim to crack his skull like a melon.

The lamp cuts through open air and misses its target, comes down hard in the junction between the gunman’s neck and shoulder as two more rounds pop off and lodge in the wall behind them. He staggers under the blow but stays on his feet, reels his revolver in wild from the side on sheer reflex and whips it across Rust’s face, busting his nose and splitting the skin stretched over his cheekbone clean and wide.

Rust goes down and hits the carpet square on his blown shoulder, nearly gags against the pain and tries to blink through the heat lightning streaking across his field of vision. The room shudders and spins back into murky focus pockmarked by smudges of black and grey, and he contemplates how and why the dead-eyed bastard hasn’t killed him yet until he spots Marty standing at the third point of the triangle now formed between them.

Marty’s gun is drawn and leveled steady but he isn’t firing, isn’t fucking shooting, just has his eyes locked tight on Rust’s like a moth drawn right to the blue flame—only it’s Rust who feels himself burning in the fire, Rust having his truths cut loose, Rust who knows right then with a bone-deep certainty that whether or not Martin Hart lives or dies, he’s sure as hell going with him.

The gunman trains his revolver on Rust and smiles, one quick upturn of his lips, before he pulls the trigger.

A single word reverberates through Rust’s mind, rings there as pure as a brass bell, and something vague within him has the presence left to instantaneously wonder if this is his redemption or his damnation, if he’s finally pardoning his own sins or absolving someone else’s. If things really do get solved when it comes right down to the bitter end, fucked as they are, because here it is at the close: _no_ , when every other time before has always been _yes, yes, yes._

It’s a split second before he realizes that it’s not his own voice saying the word. It’s not even in his head.

Marty throws himself against the gunman and sends the bullet biting into the floor, jams his gun hard into the first solid thing he hits and empties a slug into the soft spot up under his ribs. The man roars and starts shooting blind between them, squeezing off one, two, three more rounds, and one shatters the living room window but the other two Rust can’t follow, can’t fucking find, and when scarlet bursts into bloom at the small of Marty’s side he feels his blood frost over, hears his voice being ripped from his throat like the word’s being clawed out raw, doesn’t know what the fuck he’s saying outside two syllables in a name but reels one leg back with his screaming shoulder ground down against the foot of the coffee table and slams his heel into the side of the gunman’s knee.

A sharp crack; Marty’s gun hits the carpet and they both crumple to the ground in a writhing heap of tangled limbs. The other gun pops off again and this time Marty’s groaning through clenched teeth, one leg bent ugly beneath him, twisting the gunman’s trigger arm around in an effort to break and disarm with his bare hands.

Louisiana jungle, bullets riddling the earth, a dead child hanging limp in his arms. _  
  
                 You’ll do this again_.  
  
Black stars, insides wrought free, a circular window in hell opened up to the night sky. _  
  
                                    Take off your mask._

Rust snatches Marty’s .38 up and tries to push himself off the floor until he’s sitting with his back against the side of the recliner, can’t even get his feet up underneath him for leverage, just throws himself on top of Marty, presses the barrel into the spot above the gunman’s ear and blows his brains in a wide spray out over the carpet.

They’re both breathing hard when Rust flings the gun away, rolls off Marty and shoves the dead body until it flops over on its back. The floor is stained with shades of red and smeared with gore, their clothes just about the same, and Rust feels wet warmth gather under his hand as he pushes himself back into sitting.

“Where’d you get hit?” he asks, wiping blood away from his nose before pressing two fingers that aren’t so much trembling as vibrating to the soft thrum-beat beneath Marty’s ear.

“In the side, think my knee’s fucking blown,” Marty rasps, getting a hand around Rust’s wrist. “Are you—did he—?”

Rust presses along the edge of the hole at front of his right deltoid, breathes out harsh through his teeth as fire shoots clear down to the bone. The back of his arm and shoulder are clean with no point of exit but he shakes his head anyway, lets the answer coast for now. “I’ll be alright,” he says, leaving off the _so long as you are_ that gets lodged in his throat. “Need to worry about you right now.”

He works Marty’s shirt up and centers the bullet wound above his left hipbone between a thumb and forefinger, presses against Marty’s side and swears softly when a bright trickle of blood seeps from the hole.

“God _damn_ it, Rust,” Marty hisses, thrashing weak under his hands. “Christ that fucking hurts.”

“Went through and through, might’ve nicked something bad though,” Rust says, biting into his lip as he turns his attention to Marty’s left leg. The fabric around his knee is soaked dark with blood and he knows better than to jar it too much, just hoists himself off the ground on numbed joints and stumbles toward the hall.

“I’ll be right back,” he tells Marty, words fumbled out of his mouth. “Don’t fuck around with your leg.”

“Like I’m fucking going anywhere,” Marty says, and he means it every which way he can figure.

Rust walks to the bedroom with his right arm held stiff at his side, gets his belt out of the dresser with his heart pumping hard enough that his vision jumps with each beat. Pads back down the hall, palms his pocketknife and phone off the kitchen counter and sinks down to his knees at Marty’s side. Cuts the leg of his pants open and finds two holes, one in the right side of his kneecap and the other a few inches above in the lean muscle of his thigh. Cardinal-bright blood ebbs steady from each wound and Rust traces invisible paths over Marty’s leg, rolodexing half-frantic through his remembered anatomy. Deep femoral. Popliteal. Tibial, anterior and post.

“How bad is it?” Marty breathes out, fingers digging bruises into Rust’s thigh. “Feels like I’m on fire, man.”

“Bad enough that I gotta clamp it off,” Rust says when _popliteal_ flares brassy behind his eyes. “Keep holding on to me,” he murmurs, wrapping his belt around the middle of Marty’s thigh and cinching it tight in a tourniquet. Marty cusses a vivid blue streak while he punches a new hole through the leather with his knife and threads the prong through, scoring and tearing away the slack without qualm rather than letting it hang in the floor.

Rust maneuvers around until Marty’s head is settled in his lap, pulls his own shirt off and wads it up underneath the wound still bleeding at his back. Picks up the phone with steady hands and dials 911. When the operator asks for his emergency he gives their full names and recites the address, perfect down to each fine consonant and syllable.

“What happened, sir?” she repeats, voice tinny and distant on the other end of the line. “Are you injured?”

“Two of us were shot unprovoked, no critical chest wounds but I’m trying to slow the bleeding in some extremities. There’s a man out front, probably knocked unconscious but I can’t tell you for sure. Unknown gunman was killed in self-defense. Head shot.” He spares the body a glance and closes his eyes when he finds a pulsing void opened up in the floor next to it, flashing dark and bottomless in his peripherals. “Put word out to Detectives Gilbough and Papania, Baton Rouge CID. They’ll want to be in the loop.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Marty blows out on an exhale after he disconnects, face slicked over with a fine sheen of cold sweat. “You think—?”

“Yeah,” Rust says. “I do.”

Marty has the fucking audacity to try and laugh, ends up hissing ugly through his teeth when he does it. “That motherfucker didn’t say one word,” he says when the spasm passes, eyes wavering glassy on the tightened line of Rust’s jaw. “My God, you were right…” He trails off, doesn’t say about what.

“Fuck,” Rust breathes out, bowed over so an errant drop of blood from his nose lands in the dip at the base of Marty’s throat. The adrenaline is wearing off and he’s starting to shake hard. “I was hoping I wasn’t.”

Rust has got his hands wrapped around Marty’s side in a makeshift compression now, still feels blood welling and trickling hot through his fingers. Some is smeared dark red on the phone sitting next to him on the floor, either his or Marty’s, maybe both. A wider pool seeps steady out of the body near the coffee table but he doesn’t give a shit about that. His shoulder is screaming in agony but he won’t let go. Not this time.

Marty’s eyelids are starting to sink, just a little, and there’s no real telling how much blood he’s already lost, is still losing from his side. Enough that when he tries to focus his eyes on Rust he looks a little stoned, though his features suddenly wash over with a tired seriousness.

“Gotta tell you something, Rust,” he says. “S’important.”

“Nothing you need to tell me that can’t wait,” Rust says, keeping pressure applied to Marty’s side. He tries to smile but the skin on his face only pulls tight over his teeth and bones. “You already told me it was you who put cayenne in Geraci’s coffee creamer back in ’98.”

Marty closes his eyes and Rust jars his head a little, makes them flutter back open. “Not like that. This is about you.” He pauses, tries to wet his lips. “You and me.”

Rust catches the first wail of a siren in the distance coming in from the still-open door, closes his eyes and breathes deep through his nose. “You don’t have to, Marty,” he says, listening to the rain slant against the porch and blow in the through the broken window. “Don’t.”

“Yeah, I do,” Marty says, words sluggish on his tongue. “Stop being a little shitbird for two fuckin’ seconds and listen.” The sirens are getting closer now, echoing faintly through the house, and Rust opens his eyes when he feels Marty’s fingers brush the inside of his wrist.

“Know you probably don’t like hearin’ it, but you gotta know, alright? That you coming back—dragging your sorry ass back down here after all that time, pulling me into that wild mess. It was…shit, it was bad, but what we’ve got going here, what you—”

“You’re wasting your energy, Marty,” Rust says, pitched quiet. The sirens roar before they cut out but now he can see red and blue flashing through the windows. “Be still.”

“Was trying to say I love you, you ungrateful bastard,” Marty says, eyes sinking shut again. “And here you just went and fucked the moment in the ass.”

Rust’s throat goes a little tight as he watches a police officer edge in through the front door with his gun drawn, stepping around the gunman’s body to secure the premises. Another steps in behind him, signals the OK when the first shouts all-clear.

“You and your sweeping gestures,” Rust says, clearing his throat before turning his attention to the paramedics as they bustle through the door. “Hold on, the ambulance’s here.”

The paramedics come in and pull Rust’s hands away, take his shirt soaked in Marty’s blood and toss it away too. Direct him to move back and away so they can work, and Marty squeezes his hand before he goes, just a faint whisper of pressure applied to his palm.

“I’m holdin’,” Marty says, and Rust lets himself be drawn to the side, doesn’t tear his eyes away as another paramedic starts working on his arm.

She gets a good look the pale scars ghosting across his torso and inspects the ugly bruise pooling dark below his eye, presses gentle around the bullet hole before motioning for her partner in the doorway to bring another stretcher in.

“No need for that,” Rust says as she puts a compression pad on his arm, watching as Marty gets stabilized and loaded up onto a backboard. “I can walk.”

“Forgive me if I’m mistaken,” the paramedic says, not looking up from where she’s already started an IV, “but you look like you should be familiar with procedure. You’ve sustained head injuries and you still have a bullet in your arm—we need to get you stable.”

“Alright, take him out and load him up,” the paramedic near Marty says as they wheel the gurney toward the door. “Red lightning all the way, he’s probably gonna need a blood transfusion on arrival. Could stand to start morphine on the ride in, that knee’s a mess.”

As soon as the stretcher hits the porch Rust feels his stomach twist and drop like a lead balloon.

“Wait. Where are you—?” He makes to stand but two pairs of arms keep him held fast. “Listen, I gotta go with him,” he says, pulling the oxygen cannula out of his nose as Marty disappears into the night. Something ugly is rising in his chest, bubbling up hot in the back of his throat, and he can’t swallow it down, can’t fight against it. “I’m fine to ride, we’re all going to the same fuckin’ place anyhow. You can’t force me to accept transportation against my will—”

The paramedic’s hand rests light over the ink on his right arm and he has to fight the heady urge to slap it off. “Sir, you’re not thinking clearly,” she says. “You’ve been shot and you’re probably going into shock—”

“No,” Rust says, prying the paramedic’s blue-gloved fingers off him with a sharp flourish of his hand. His breath is coming too-fast and short now, the world gone soft as cotton around the edges. “I need to ride with him, I need to—you people don’t fucking understand, I’ve got to tell him, they took him before I could tell him—”

“He’s having a panic attack,” somebody says from above, voice carrying down like it’s coming through a long tunnel. “Put some midazolam through the IV, he’s going to hurt himself.”

Rust tries to stand again when something clear is pushed through his IV port but hands are holding him down onto a backboard, keeping him there while they strap him into place. Somebody tells him to be still and this time he is, lays there shaking so hard he thinks he’s going to vomit.

“He doesn’t know,” he says, and not a soul thinks to ask who or why.

It takes three minutes and eighteen seconds for the drugs to kick in. Nobody’s counting but Rust. A fucking miracle considering the shit that used to flow through Crash’s veins like water, but he takes it, lets them do him up peachy and watches the ambulance ceiling drip down the walls in fat globs that taste like rainwater and plasma.

The world fades out, and Rust fades with it.

   
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Massive ongoing shout-out to karategirl448, who has been the best beta and source of support I could ask for while writing this chapter and every other chapter beyond. U da 1, girl.
> 
> Keep the faith, kids. Until next time!


	21. heart line

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The two poems used within don't belong to me and have been duplicated here in a form that isn't entirely true to their original format. Please check out the ending notes for the appropriate titles and authors.

The air is like smooth plastic on his tongue, cool and sterile and bright white tinged with a drop of blue. His sight clears out through a fading vapor and the first thing Rust sees is a tiny brunette with caramel-dark skin, squeezing the IV bag hanging next to his bed.  
  
“At last, he awakens,” she says, face sharpening into a soft mouth and one crooked dimple under her left eye. He watches her hands move around the beeping machines and tubes, short nails painted a pink that tastes like sugar crystals left at the bottom of a cookie tin. “How are you feeling?”

Rust’s upper arm is wrapped in a fresh dressing with his hospital gown pulled away to expose his bare shoulder and chest. He looks down at it now, finds his arm tucked close to his body and resting in a long sling hooked like a yoke around his neck. He flexes his fingers against his stomach, watches the tendons in his forearm flutter and roll under the body of an old black bird.  
                              
His voice scrapes like sandpaper over rough stone when he first speaks. “Where’s Marty?”

“Gotta give you points for consistency,” the nurse says with a little sigh, coming around to take his blood pressure. “They tell me that’s the last thing you said before you went under for surgery.”

Rust stares at the side of her face while she ticks off the seconds on her watch, catching his eye as she releases the pressure cuff. “The question still stands,” he says, mouth barely moving to shape the words.

“Listen,” the nurse says, “I don’t generally dole out that kind of information in line with hospital privacy regulations.” She breezes back around to the other side of the bed and pulls Rust’s hospital gown up over his shoulder, leaning close enough that he can feel the warmth of her murmured words cutting through the cold air between them. “But you two are obviously attached at the hip and Mr. Hart is in the room down the hall—he’s still asleep for the time being, and you’ve got guests waiting outside anyhow.”

“Who?” Rust asks, glancing at the name badge clipped to her scrubs, featuring her smile tuned brighter and the name _Lyssa_ printed black and bold.

“Two gentlemen,” Lyssa says. “They’ve been here since about six this morning. Detectives Gilb—”

“Let them in,” Rust says, and realizes he’d snapped over her voice like a steel trap. “Please,” he adds, softer this time. “It’s—it’s important I speak to them.”

Lyssa arches an eyebrow and straightens the sheet bunched up around his hips. “I’ll show them in, then.”

The light coming in between the blinds is pale, weak tea cloudy with milk. Morning, then, just on the cusp of sunrise, and the threadbare expressions Gilbough and Papania are wearing when they walk into the room are only further testament to the early hour.

“Mr. Cohle,” Gilbough says, nodding once. Papania’s eyes go straight to Rust’s face and stay there, taking careful inventory of the fucked-up mess Rust hasn’t had the chance to see yet.

“Detectives,” he says, blinking at Papania. “Appreciate you coming out.”

“For what it’s worth, we would’ve preferred not to make the trip,” Gilbough says, pulling two visitor chairs up around the bed and dropping down into one of them. “Bad enough to see this case dusted off, you and Hart landed back in a bad way aside.”

“Don’t know how you two lived through a third round of this shit,” Papania says, leaning back in the other chair. “Cleaned right up with another head shot to boot. Hart’s living room was one big slip-n-slide last night—you blew that motherfucker to kingdom come.”

Rust looks between them without moving his head. “You’re opening Carcosa back up?”

“Can’t say for certain just yet. Gunman’s still undergoing autopsy and ID but you might be interested to know that he had something branded into his sternum,” Gilbough says, folding his hands in his lap. “A spiral.”

Rust nods and swallows, suddenly wishing he had a cup of ice water at hand, tongue heavy and stuck fast to the roof of his mouth. “Make sure you check all the tox screenings for meth, LSD, various psychedelics,” he says. “He didn’t say one word the whole time, eyes were rolling wild in his head. Fucker was blitzed out of his mind.”

“You think he’d had his eye on you for a while?” Papania asks. “Any warning signs, anything that might’ve tipped you off? He obviously knew where to find you. At Hart’s house, even—two birds with one stone.”

Rust shifts slightly in bed, dragging his heel halfway up his calf under the blankets. “Yeah, he knew where to find me,” he says, staring hard into the wedge of empty space between the two men. “Marty and I live together.”

Gilbough sits like a stone but Papania’s eyes widen the barest fraction of an inch. “You live together,” he repeats, tilting his head back to scratch under his chin. “Of course you do.”

“We’ll keep you in the loop as things come to light,” Gilbough says, standing from his chair and bumping Papania’s shoulder in the process. “Not much to go off this early, but so far it looks like you’re in the clear as far as self-defense goes. Stand Your Ground holds, plus the delivery kid in your driveway came to and gave us confirmation on who clocked him.”

“You have to understand that this could be an opportunity,” Rust says, half-hoarse, watching them slowly edge toward the door. “To not let shit fall through the cracks for a third time.”

“We’re not even sure if this’ll pick up steam beyond attempted murder by a psychotic visionary,” Papania says, adjusting his belt holster before looking up. “But we thought we at least owed you the favor.”

“Try and get some rest for now,” Gilbough says, though he looks doubtful as the words leave his mouth. “We’ll be in touch.”

“Yeah, well you’ll know where to find me,” Rust says, not bothering to return Papania’s two-fingered salute as they file back out into the hall. The door shuts behind them and Rust closes his eyes, breathes shallow through his nose until the wave of nausea passes over him and sinks into the floor.

Lyssa eases back into the room a few moments later with a cup of crushed ice, producing a few packets of gauze and saline from the cabinet near the door.

“Your surgeon should be in later to give you a rundown on what’s happening with your arm,” she says, setting everything on the rolling table next to the bed before snapping a purple glove on one hand. “I’m gonna try and clean your face up a little more in the meantime—they left you looking a little ragged after stitching that cheek back up.”

“Sure I’ve looked worse,” Rust says, staring into his lap as she gently dabs at dried blood around his eye.

Lyssa dampens a clean square of gauze and swabs it over his lids and down the bridge of his nose, humming a little as she works. “I remember you two, you know,” she says, trying to press feather-light over the bruising. “I’d just started shadowing one of the older RN’s the same week you came in. When he finally got out of bed Mr. Hart would roll past your door a couple times every hour and stick his head in the room.”

“I’m not surprised,” Rust says, even though this is the first time he’s ever heard as much. “Marty can be real persistent like that.”  

Lyssa smiles. “He must be a good friend.”

Rust’s eyes swerve around to find hers, softened some in the rising light. “You could say that,” he says, regarding the creases inside her elbow left by a long-sleeved undershirt rolled up. “Though he’s something more than that to me.”

Lyssa’s hand stops mid-air somewhere between her waist and shoulder, fingers still poised around a folded square of gauze. The room is quiet enough that Rust can almost hear the edges of realization slide and click into place.

“I’ll tell you as soon as he wakes up,” she says, movements slowly reanimating back into life. “We’ll get you in there to see him. I’ll make sure of it.”

“Appreciate that,” Rust says, palming the cup of ice and sagging back into the pillow. His mouth is still dry and fatigue weighs heavy in his bones, and he knows without asking that they have him hooked up to a pain drip. Fentanyl, probably, considering the shit’s still potent enough to work.

“Don’t wear yourself out in the meantime,” Lyssa says, and Rust’s eyes are already drifting back shut as she eases the ice out of his hand and sets the call button nearby. “You gotta look fresh for when you visit your man.”

“Mmm,” Rust hums, already half-asleep. He doesn’t try to fight it, only lets himself drift off into a warm-hued blackness.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“Rust,” a familiar voice is calling. Fresh mint, dying flowers. Lavender fabric softener and sweet tea watered down by melted ice. “Rust—can you hear me?”

“Maggie,” Rust says, just before opening his eyes. The name sparks clear across his mind but still fumbles clumsy from his mouth. “When’d you get here?”

She’s there, standing two feet from the bed with a death grip around the handle of her pocketbook. Maggie was never one for much rouge but her face is a few shades paler than he remembers, wan and tired, lips pressed into a colorless line.

“I’m sorry if I woke you up,” she says, taking a step closer, one foot edged forward. “Some of the nurses know me and let me come back. I just walked in a second ago.”

“You talk to Marty?” Rust asks, sitting up further in bed. “Is he awake?”

“Not yet,” Maggie breathes out. “They tell me he was in surgery until midnight, woke up in recovery for a little bit but wasn’t fully lucid. I guess they’ve got him doped up for the time being—he’s been out cold ever since.”

Rust’s eyes flick over her for a moment. Tailored jeans, a pastel blue button-down creased along the front where it had bunched up around her hips in the car. Her hair is clean but unstyled and hangs limp around her shoulders. She’d been in a hurry.  
  
“How’d you even know to come?” he asks.  
  
“Marty still has me listed as an emergency contact,” Maggie says, soft smile more tired than the rest of her put together. She doesn’t say whether she was surprised to find that out or not. “You were number one, but that wouldn’t have done much good, would it?”

“Don’t guess I’m at top form right now,” Rust says, idly crooking the fingers of his braced arm. “Appreciate you coming, but I don’t think there’s much you can do right now. We’re both gonna be grounded for the next week at least.”

“Jesus, Rust,” Maggie says, tossing her head back to stare at the ceiling. “What was it we were talking about one time? That people can’t change—that there’s no such thing as forgiveness?” She laughs and the sound of it verges on something brittle-thin. “What if I came just to see you—to see if you were alright?”

He stays quiet and lets his eyes waver on the fine edge of her jaw. Silence threads between them, tight enough to pluck out a tune if you thrummed it just right, and Rust clears his throat to dispel it. “Thank you,” he says. And then, just as low, “You can sit down, if you want.”

Maggie eases herself into the chair Gilbough had occupied earlier, balancing her purse across her knees like a counterweight. “What happened last night?” she asks, pale gaze locking on his. “I haven’t gotten the clear story yet. Was it something to do with—that place?”

_That place_. Rust blinks. _That place, that place, thatplacethatplace_. The central tomb, the throne room, the epicenter of a hell draped in yellow muslin. The word itself remains unspoken but crumbles like rotted wood in the air between them, earthy and faintly rancid.

“Yes,” he tells her. “Seems that way, anyhow.”

“My God,” Maggie says, and Rust has to bite off the urge to tell her God’s got nothing to do with it. “You two were just randomly attacked? At home?”

“Don’t know how random it was.” Rust leans back and studies their joint reflection in the dark television screen up on the wall. “Guy forced his way in—thought he was the fucking delivery driver at the door. Caught me once in the arm. There was a struggle. I tried to keep him from getting to Marty but that didn’t last long.”

“He went through you to get to Marty.”

“No,” Rust says, feeling his lungs deflate. “Marty walked right into it. Had his gun drawn and didn’t think to fucking use it. He got—distracted.”

Maggie’s been worrying her bottom lip along the ridge of her teeth, biting some pinkness back into it. She stops at that, mouth falling slightly parted. “By what?”

“By me,” Rust says, hating how the word bubbles up and bursts in the back of his throat. “He charged the guy—dove in front of me. Slugged him one and then took three himself before I could end it.”

His eyes burn hot and he looks away, staring hard enough to peel paint off the wall. “He could’ve died, trying to fuckin’ save me.” His voice falters, then, suddenly scraped raw down to the wet pink. “He shouldn’t have done it. Of all the fucking people to die for—”

“Shut up, Rust, for Christ’s sake.” Maggie laughs shallow and gasps a little at the tail-end of it, and when Rust looks up he’s surprised to find tears on her face. “After all these years you’re still trying to convince yourself that you don’t matter when you _do._ ”

She scoots her chair forward in a series of sharp scrapes that jingle the metal on her purse, inching closer to the bed until she rests her hand over his good one, pale milk spilled over burnt gold.

Rust swallows hard and lets her.

“Don’t cry, Maggie,” he murmurs, eyes slanted down into her lap. “I don’t deserve it. Neither does Marty.”

“You two deserve each other, fucked up as you are,” she says, thumbing around her eyes. “In all the years I knew you before and since—not even with Laurie, what little time you gave her—, I’ve never seen you care about another person like you care about Marty.”

“I haven’t,” Rust says. “Not in a long time.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Mid-morning gives way to afternoon. The police come to ask questions and Rust’s surgeon comes to answer them. (“The bullet fractured your humeral shaft and missed the deep brachial by less than two inches, Mr. Cohle, but considering your track record I guess that isn’t much more than a flesh wound.”) Tapioca pudding is steadfastly ignored in favor of ice chips and three unsalted crackers and Marty sleeps on until he’s awake.

The moment Lyssa walks in the room every nerve ending in Rust’s body _knows_ , like somebody’s flipped a switch that sends a homing current thrumming low through his bones.

“He’s up,” she says around a smile, pulling a wheelchair into the room. Rust is already trying to shift forward and swing one leg over the side of the bed and she rushes over to steady him. “Whoa there hoss, slow down—if you fall and break your other arm we’re both gonna be screwed.”

When Rust is settled into the wheelchair with his IV fluids hanging aloft Lyssa stands at his side, trying to tie his hospital gown up the back.

“Don’t worry about that,” he says, trying to reign the edge out of his voice. “I’m not modest. Let’s go.”

“The whole ward’s about to get a free show,” she says, sighing and pushing him out of the room. “You may as well be wearing a handkerchief.”

“Don’t have anything y’all haven’t seen before,” he says, watching the room numbers flash past. “What room’s he in?”

“Just a few more down, 315 on the right. The first thing he did was ask for you,” Lyssa says, leaning over so she can speak in low tones close to Rust’s ear. “Well—the first thing he said was _get this fuckin’ oxygen off my face_ , but then he asked for you. So small victories, right?”

As soon as they turn into the room Rust feels bruise-green nausea roll hot in the pit of his stomach, has to press the back of his hand against his mouth and breathe sharp through his nose. Lyssa stops his wheelchair at Marty’s bedside and touches two fingers to his shoulder, lips parted in silent question, and Rust only waves her off.

“I’m alright,” he tells her, forcing the words through his teeth. “I’ll be alright.”

The nurse walks away and it’s just him and Marty and the measured beep of monitors filling the room. Rust hunched over in a wheelchair with his gimp arm yoked around his neck, one eye damn near swollen shut and a face beat to hell; Marty with his left leg casted to mid-thigh and hoisted in the air, wound drains trailing down to the bed beneath.

“Hey there,” Marty murmurs, gone bashful as a love-struck teenager. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”

And then, following the weight of Rust’s gaze, “Really not as bad as it looks.”

He’s been covered up but Rust knows if he pulled the sheet back he’d find clean gauze patched over his side, has to fight an itching impulse to reach out and press against the bright white, run his fingers over the edges where surgical tape meets Marty’s skin.

“Bullshit,” Rust says, words still half-muffled behind his hand. “You’re not gonna walk clean on that for the rest of the year—if ever again, Marty.”

“Guess we kinda switched roles from last time, then,” Marty says. “Reckon it was my turn to take the better beating.”

Rust feels a thread unravel somewhere up in his ribcage, snag tight and snap loose so hard the rebound nearly claps the air out of him.

“You fucking idiot,” he chokes out from behind his clenched fist, raw heat threatening to boil over at the corners of his eyes. “Why’d you do it? Why would you _ever_ —”

“Hush up,” Marty says, reaching down and finding Rust’s hand on the side of the bed, taking his fingers and pressing them into his palm. “I knew what the hell I was doing when I did it. Clear as fucking day. And I’d—goddamn it, Rust.”

His voice catches fast and rattles hoarse in his throat. Rust shakes his head, tries to ward the words off, but Marty only closes his eyes and weakly squeezes his hand until he finds them again.

“I’d do it a thousand more times,” he says. “Every time. You hear me? Every fucking time.”

“Marty,” Rust says. “God, Marty,” and this time the name falls like broken glass from his lips, shatters in a stark white room full of trilling machines and stainless steel. He bows over in his wheelchair until he’s pushed up against Marty’s good side, face buried and voice muffled in the white sheet. He’s vibrating from the top of his head all the way down the curved line of his spine, vertebrae visible and sharp through the hospital gown hanging open at his back.

The sobs come quiet but Marty feels them rocking through his ribcage, stoking up a deep ache that maybe wasn’t hurting there before. He doesn’t say anything, only pulls his hand free from Rust’s and lets it rest heavy against the back of his neck, thumb parting through the fine curls there while the other man shakes beneath him.

“You gotta accept that people might actually care about your stubborn ass,” Marty says after a while, trying to talk around the gravel in his throat.  “Maybe me, most of all.”

Rust doesn’t even raise his head up, only turns so his words press hoarse and warm against Marty’s side. “You have two girls,” he says. “A baby granddaughter now—”

“And you don’t?” Marty asks, combing his fingers through the hair above Rust’s ear. “Don’t pitch me that bullshit, _Pop_.”

“It ain’t the same thing, Marty. You know that.”

“Do I?”

Rust draws in a ragged breath, slowly sits back up in his wheelchair with a tight grimace as his shoulder stretches. His good eye looks scrubbed raw, pink and swollen around the edges so that the blue stands out icy-bright.

“I meant to tell you the other night,” he says, gaze thrown up against some high point on the wall. “What you said, there at the end. You gotta know that I feel—feel the same way.”

Marty looks at Rust under the sparse fan of his lashes, tries to keep the burning smile off his face. “I lost a lot of blood,” he says as seriously as he can manage, watching the line of Rust’s throat work up and down. “Memory’s a little hazy still. You might have to remind me.”

“Christ,” Rust says, wiping harsh against his eyes with the back of his hand. “You’re gonna make me say it.”

Marty smiles full-on now, mouth screwed up into a crooked grin. “Say what, now?”

Rust’s eyes draw off the wall and sweep back around to meet Marty’s with an exhausted intensity burning there, something that could probably run the whole fucking world if Rust was more willing to share it. It wipes the smile right off Marty’s face, makes his heart lock up and almost knocks him winded.

“That I do,” Rust says, voice held even. “That I love you.”

Marty tries to laugh but the sound doesn’t quite take to the air, falls frail and damp in the sheets between them. He nods once—for his own good or Rust’s, he doesn’t rightly know—and reaches up to run the pad of his thumb under the stitches tracking below Rust’s eye, half-surprised the other man stays still enough to let him.

“Fucked you up pretty good,” he says, mapping over the paper-thin skin of Rust’s eyelids, now washed over with livid smears of puce and dirty indigo. “Still a handsome bastard, though.”

When he makes to pull away Rust reaches up and catches his wrist between gentle fingers, holds Marty's hand there and turns his face into it. The tip of his nose skims across the worn groove of Marty’s heart line until he presses his mouth into the center of his palm, once and then again, just the barest brush of warm lips before easing their hands back down onto the bed.

“The shit you do to me,” Marty says, hardly more than a whisper. “Got me so fucked up, Rust. It ain’t—it ain’t natural.”

Rust’s eyes are cast down when he shakes his head, fingertips tracing idle patterns in the sheet beside Marty’s arm.

“Loving’s a natural thing to do,” he says. “Trying to deny it isn’t.”

Marty shakes his head, bottom lip caught fast between his teeth. He heaves out a sigh and it shakes more than he’d ever care to admit.

“My God,” he says. “Now that I’ve heard those words come out of your mouth I don’t know if I’ve got anything else to play for. Whole game is ruined—there’s nothing left to the chase.”

“You got a whole lot to live for yet,” Rust says, sagging back into his wheelchair. “Primarily getting your ass up out of this hospital bed and getting home sooner than later so I can kill you myself.”

“Kill me how?” Marty asks, arching a lewd eyebrow.

“Not the way you’re hoping,” Rust says, and if he had a cigarette in his hand the sentence would’ve been punctuated by a stream of smoke. “I can tell you that much.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


That evening, Lyssa bids farewell with a promise to be back for the morning shift.

“This is Kay,” she says, introducing the freckled strawberry blonde standing beside her. “She’ll be taking care of you two through the night, so try not to give her too hard a time.”

“Howdy,” Kay says with a little wave, accent lilting straight out of eastern Texas.

“I’m sure we’ll be tearin’ up the place,” Marty says, trying to sneak a peek at Rust’s fan of cards. He throws one down on the bed and thumbs through his own hand, tongue caught between his teeth in a crooked grin. “Rust doesn’t like to dawdle on dates so I might have to start making rounds around the nurses’ station in the meantime, test out the ol’ Southern Charm.”

“’Cept your ass ain’t moving from this bed,” Rust says, fanning his cards out and revealing the winning hand. “Straight flush, hot shot.”

“Every damn time,” Marty says, letting his cards fall flat against his good thigh. He tips his head back against the pillow and blinks at the ceiling. “You beating my ass at cards is gonna get old real quick.”

“I’m outta here in thirty,” Lyssa says while Kay flips through Marty’s chart. “Can I get anything for you before I’m gone and Kay’s on her own? Dirty mags? Cigarettes? Lottery tickets?”

Marty half-expects Rust to ask for a pack of his standard Camel Blues but when he opens his mouth no such request hits the air.

“You got any decent books laying around here?” he asks. “Classics, poetry, philosophy?”

“What he really wants are some of them trashy harlequin romances,” Marty says. “One with Fabio on the cover, probably, since he bears such a striking likeness to me.”

Lyssa snorts and drums her fingers on her hip for a moment. “You know,” she says, cutting her eyes to Rust, “I might have just the thing.”

  
  
  


“Little Women and a goddamn poetry anthology,” Marty says, looking at the titles in Rust’s hands. “We would’ve been better off with an issue of Penthouse.”

“Some people read for more than the pictures, Marty,” Rust says, tossing _Little Women_ aside and balancing the anthology on his knee to flip through the dog-eared pages. He skims slow over the glossary, trying to pull a familiar title loose from the mess.

“Naw,” Marty says, crunching around some ice chips. “Go ahead and class me up. I reckon I’d sit here and listen to you read the fuckin’ phone book if it meant keeping you nearby.”

Rust blinks at that but doesn’t look up, clears his throat and slips his fingers between the cited pages. “Here we go,” he says, running the edge of his thumb over the title. “'This Is Just To Say.'”  
  


_I have eaten_  
the plums  
that were in  
the icebox

_and which_  
you were probably  
saving  
for breakfast

_Forgive me_  
they were delicious  
so sweet  
and so cold  
  


“The fuck kind of pretentious shit is that?” Marty asks, spitting an ice chip back into his cup. “Plums? Jesus Christ."

“You’re not looking at the underlying meaning, _Detective_ ,” Rust says, eyes cast over with sleepy agitation. “He’s apologetic for taking the fruit of their innocence. It’s a metaphor for the allure of virginity.”

Marty snorts and sets his ice cup down. “You trying to say something about something? I don’t recall you seeming too sorry about taking my fuckin’ ass virginity that one time.”

“I can wheel outta here right now and unplug the television,” Rust says, sitting back in his wheelchair. “Hit the call button and tell them you need a new catheter put in.”

“Go right ahead and untwist your panties,” Marty says, extending his hand for Rust to place the book into. “I’ll do you one better than that and I ain’t even looking.” He scrunches his eyes shut and fans through the pages a few times before jabbing his finger between two pages near the back.

“This one here,” he says after glancing at the title and handing the book back to Rust. His voice lowers and deepens, taking on a familiar drawling tone. “Let’s try to find the _underlying meaning_ in that.”

“'Domestic _,'”_ Rust reads, and then begins to recite aloud, whistling soft around the sharp s’s. “If, when studying road atlases while taking, as you call it, your  morning dump, you shout down to  me names like Miami City, Franconia, Cancún, as places for you to take  me to from here, can I help it if—”

“Of fucking course I pick the one about some guy taking a shit,” Marty sighs, eyes sinking shut in something akin to defeat. “I’m on the losing streak of my life this week.”

Rust glares at the side of his face and clicks his tongue against his teeth. “Are you gonna talk through every single goddamn poem in this book?”

“No, no,” Marty sighs, shifting around so his casted leg sways a few inches in the air. “M’sorry. Keep going.”

“All I can think is things that are stupid,” Rust continues, “like _he loves me he loves me not?_ I don’t think so. No more than, some mornings, waking to your hands around me, and remembering these are the fingers, the hands I’ve over and over given myself to, I can stop myself from wondering does that mean they’re the same I’ll grow old with.”

“Yesterday, in the café I keep meaning to show you, I thought this is how I’ll die maybe, alone, somewhere too far away from wherever you are then, my heart racing from espresso and too many cigarettes, my head down on the table’s cool marble, and the ceiling fan turning slowly above me, like fortune, the part of fortune that’s half-wished—for only—it did not seem the worst way.”

Rust hears his voice crack halfway down the page but keeps going, not bothering to cut the frayed edge out of his throat, not tearing his eyes away and looking up because he couldn’t do it even if he fucking tried.

Marty’s quiet, breathing soft, the only other string of sound in the room outside the words on the page and the machines keeping steady time around them.

“I thought this is another of those things I’m always forgetting to tell you or don’t choose to tell you,” Rust breathes out, “or I tell you but only in the same way, each morning, I keep myself from saying too loud _I love you_ until the moment you flush the toilet, then I say it, when the rumble of water running down through the house could mean anything.”  
  
“Anything,” Rust repeats. “Flood, your feet descending the stairs any moment; any moment the whole world, all I want of the world, coming down.”

The final stanza trails off and Rust stares down at the anthology spread open between his thighs, letting the tempered sound of hospital-grade silence drape heavy over the air.

When he finally looks up—seconds, minutes, hours later—, the planes of Marty’s face are smoothed over but his eyes look older than Rust can ever remember, every spark of childish delight and rogue humor gutted and left to bleed out from the familiar blue. Everything’s boiled back down to bare white bones like this is the first time, the first time he’s ever really stood back and taken a moment to _look._

“How’s that for underlying meaning,” Rust croaks out, and Marty doesn’t laugh.

“Come here,” he says, leaning to the side as Rust rises halfway. The book slides off Rust’s lap and they meet somewhere in the middle, pressed together in a mismatched seam never cut even enough to line up perfect, Marty with a hand around the back of Rust’s neck, drawing him close and pressing his nose into the soft hair behind his ear.

“I think,” he says, lips ghosting against the warmth of Rust’s neck, “that might be enough poetry for one fucking day.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Fifteen minutes after visiting hours are over, Kay walks in and finds Rust slumped over and pressed up against Marty’s side, slinged arm nestled in his lap with his head cradled in the crook of the other. They’re both breathing soft in a complimentary rhythm, sleep-warm and pliant with _Little Women_ wedged in the space between them.

She clears her throat and touches two fingers to Rust’s shoulder, drawing them away when he inhales sharp and sits up, knocking the book to the floor.

“Alright Romeo,” she says, leaning her weight into the wheelchair handles. “We gotta put you to bed. I’m probably getting my ass handed to me for letting you stay up this long.”

“Why the fuck do I gotta be Juliet?” Marty slurs, cracking open an eye. “Rust’s the pretty one.”

Rust pinches the bridge of his nose between two fingers and rolls his neck until it pops, IV tubing following his movements. “Alright,” he says, picking the books up off the floor and setting them on Marty’s bedside table. “I’ll be back in the morning. Get some more rest.”

“Where do you think you’re going?” Kay asks, walking to the other side of the room and pulling a long curtain back to reveal an empty hospital bed. She smiles, one side of her mouth quirked up higher than the other. “We’ve gone ahead and upgraded your sleeping arrangements.”

“Aww shit, Rust,” Marty says, tipping his head back to giggle-snort. “Ain’t that precious? We’re having a sleepover.”

“Only because you’d pine like a kicked dog the whole night if I left,” Rust says, standing from the wheelchair on creaking joints. “They’re gonna put us through psych eval for grossly atypical codependence.”

“Nah,” Kay says, laughing as she unhooks his IV fluids and follows him across the room. “We just thought y’all were too damn cute to separate and wanted to free up the other room.”

She helps Rust into the empty bed and gets his IV bag sorted out, routinely checking vitals and medicating both of them before pulling Marty’s sheet back to check the wound in his side.

“Looking good so far,” she murmurs, exposing the pale line of his hip as she rucks his hospital gown up and peers behind the bandage. “Drainage is normal—how’s the pain?”

“Uhh, hasn’t been bad,” Marty says, glancing between her and Rust while she feels around his thigh and pelvis. “Whatever y’all are pumping into me seems to be doing the trick.”

“Good,” she says, tucking him back in before flicking off the overhead light. “I’ll be back to check on y’all through the night. Rest up for now, because in the morning it’s bath time.”

As the sound of her rubber-soled clogs disappear down the hall, Marty finds Rust’s eyes in the dim light and widen.

“Feel like I need to apologize for making fun of all them sponge baths you got last year.”

“Mmhmm,” Rust hums, sighing as his eyes slip shut. “Karma’s a real bitch.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The days edge by in a slow crawl, gathering up and burning through the better part of a week.

Shelley swings by on the second day, sniffling suspiciously with a bouquet of white flowers and the promise to take care of Ghost ( _y’all’s baby girl_ , she’d said) until they get settled in back home. She hugs them both when she leaves and it’s not until she disappears down the hall that Rust realizes the shoulder of his shirt is damp.

Maggie comes to visit again, this time with the girls and baby in tow, and insists steadfast on helping get the house put back in order.

“I made some phone calls,” she says, looking between Rust and Marty, who has Lilah balanced and cooing on his good thigh. “Crime scene cleanup should be out there tomorrow afternoon and they’re fixing the window on Wednesday.”

She reaches up and tucks her bangs behind one ear, nails trailing along the edge of her temple. “Unfortunately neither one takes care of bullet holes, so you’re on your own there.”

“Nothing a little wall putty can’t fix,” Marty says, making faces at Lilah and earning a gummy smile in return. “Appreciate it, Mags.”  
  
  


“You didn’t have to do that, Maggie,” Rust says later, talking to her in low tones just outside the door while Audrey and Macie bid farewell to Marty. The bruising on his face is starting to green around the edges, muddier and more brassy than stark plum, and she wonders in a vague and half-dizzying thought about what he’d do if she reached up and pressed two fingers against it.

“I didn’t,” she agrees, crossing her arms instead. “But there’s no good reason for you to scrub blood out of the carpet when you finally get home, is there?”

Rust watches her for a moment, lids drawn heavy.

“No,” he says, turning to peer down the recovery ward. “I guess not.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Rust is discharged on a Thursday afternoon, two days shy of a week.

“I’m gonna head back, start getting some shit pulled together for you,” he says, though he doesn’t specify what. They already have their cell phones and toiletries with them plus wallets, laptops, and a change of clothes apiece, most of which Rust hasn’t bothered to pack up in the handle-topped plastic bag Lyssa brought him. “You want me to bring anything back?”

“You don’t need to sit around here and babysit me,” Marty mumbles, flipping through channels on the television. He won’t look away from the screen. “Go on home and sleep in the bed, I’ll keep just fine in the meantime.”

Rust idly presses against the cotton taped over the side of his wrist, hiding the telltale bruise of a blown vein left from his IV port. They hadn’t been able to get one in the soft inner junction of his left elbow.

“Alright,” he says, drawing the word out slow and stowing his shit in the plastic bag. “Call me if you think of something.”

Lyssa wheels him downstairs to where Shelley’s waiting with the car idling, squeezes his shoulder even though the top of her head only hits his collarbones. “I’d say it’s been nice,” she says with the dimple deepening under her eye, “but I don’t guess this was any free trip to Disney.”

Rust stands and squints off into the afternoon, reaches out to brush his fingers against her elbow, trying to transfer a thought through the bridged line of contact.

“Best vacation I’ve had in a while,” he says, offering her the wry edge of a smile. “Thank you.”  
  
  
  


Shelley prattles the whole way back to the house, pointing out landmarks and remarking on new road construction like Rust’s been gone ten years. She has a dream catcher swinging from her rear view mirror and he wants to reach out and yank it down every time they turn a corner, pitch it out the window into one of the retention trenches lining the road.

He glances down at his phone one or two times every minute, half-expecting Marty’s name to flash up on the screen. It never does.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Marty leaves the television running after Rust leaves but drags down the volume until it’s almost muted, fumbles around on his bedside table and comes back up with the poetry anthology. He pushes his reading glasses low on the bridge of his nose and scans through the table of contents until he finds the title he was looking for, flipping back to the page he’d picked a few days before.

He reads the verse once more and again, mouth silently wrapping around some of the words, thankful that this time Rust isn’t there to see him cry.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The carpet in the living room is clean but also brand new, permeating the house with the heady smell of chemical-soaked textile, something pungent that tastes like a mix between new plastic and urinal cake. The odor makes something throb inside Rust’s skull but he closes the door behind him anyways, walks over the virgin beige and sets his bag down on the counter.

Everything has been put into order as promised—new window, new door, no blood, no shiny-slick grey matter spattered across the wall below the TV. The house is the same as it was before and ever better, save for two slugs lodged in the drywall above the couch.

Rust fingers around the perimeter of each one and presses a thumb over one hole so hard it leaves an indentation in his skin. His phone buzzes twice in his pocket while he’s studying the groove and he pulls it out, eyes scanning over the message, finding eight words pulled free from form and typed out by familiar hands.

_somewhere too far away from wherever you are_

and then, scrolling down—

_ain’t that some shit_

Rust waits for his heart to stop pounding in his throat before he gets his truck keys off the kitchen counter and walks back out the front door.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“Is that fried chicken?” Marty asks when Rust walks back into the hospital room that evening with a box of wings from the deli. He doesn’t say anything about earlier, though his eyes are brighter than Rust remembers them being all morning. “God bless your gentle soul.”

Kay’s on shift that night and shakes her head when she walks in on her first round and finds them propped up and watching a movie on Marty’s laptop, blaring the sound of Tuco’s voice echoing shrill across a desert canyon.

“Did you _drive_ yourself here?” she asks Rust when they both look up, fingers digging into her hips. “With the high-dose painkillers the doctor has you on?”

“I haven’t been taking them,” he says, might as well be saying _the sky is fucking blue, Kay, you know that._

The spare bed in Marty’s room gets marked down as occupied, and Rust doesn’t sleep at home that night or the next.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


A slow and uneventful handful of days after Rust’s would-be release, Marty finally gets the all-clear to head home. The surgeon comes in that morning with his hands stuffed in his coffee-stained coat, eyeballing Rust with an ounce of loose familiarity but delivering the departing verdict all the same.

“Cast and crutches for six weeks or longer with physiotherapy a surefire landmark on the horizon,” he says, handing Marty a scrawled prescription for short-term antibiotics and a painkiller. “There’re some pins in there that are going to give you one hell of a time when you start moving around again, but stay off it as much as you can for the time being. Chew a baby aspirin if you start getting antsy between the painkillers.”

Marty scratches under his chin and drags his hand around to palm the back of his neck. “How am I supposed to shower with this thing clear up to my thigh?”

“You’re not,” the surgeon says, jingling some loose change in his pocket. “Tub baths until it comes off and don’t you dare get it wet. It’s always easier if somebody gives you a hand,” he adds, eyes cutting between him and Rust.

“We’ll figure it out,” Rust says after the surgeon walks out, letting Marty use his good shoulder to pull himself up off the edge of the bed and settle into the wheelchair. “Maybe we’ll get you some of that bubblegum bath shit, comes in the pink bottle.”

“Maybe you’d better quit while you’re ahead,” Marty grumbles, watching the nurse—neither Lyssa nor Kay this time, both on their day off—prop his cast up so it doesn’t drag the ground. “We’re not even home and I’m already going stir-crazy.”

Rust hangs Marty’s bag off the back of the wheelchair and picks up his crutches in one hand, blowing out a quiet sigh.

“Yeah,” he says, studying the Louisiana morning slanting in crossways through the window. “Thinking I could go for a smoke.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Getting Marty from the Cadillac to the front door takes no less than three small miracles, both of them swearing and sweating all the way up the front walk.

“I didn’t think using crutches would be that fuckin’ hard,” he half-gasps, watching Rust unlock the door. “That shit don’t come natural.”

“Straight to the bedroom,” Rust says, blinking and swinging the door wide. “Up over the step, now—one, two, thr— _goddamn it,_ Marty, that’s my fucking foot.”

“Shit, sorry,” Marty hisses, crutching into the living room. He looks around once he’s inside, momentarily dazed. “They replaced the whole fucking carpet?”

“Guessing it was too big a mess for the soap and water treatment,” Rust says, shutting and locking the door behind them. He briefly catches his bottom lip between his teeth, scanning over the room. “There was a lot of blood.”

Marty’s eyes go straight to the bullet holes in the wall and linger there, only catching Rust as he slides into view along his peripherals.

“Hadn’t gotten around to taking care of that yet,” Rust says. “I’ll go to the hardware store sometime this afternoon.”

“I need to lay down,” Marty says, sweat glistening around his temples as he crutches down the hall. “Right now.”

Marty eases down onto his side of the bed, letting Rust take his crutches and lean them up against the wall. He lies there with his eyes clenched shut, breathing heavy through his nose.

“I need to pick up your scripts, probably get some baby aspirin and ginger ale while I’m out,” Rust says, quiet, standing rigid next to the bedside table. “You need anything?”

“Yeah,” Marty says, voice wound too-tight around the edges. “Come over here and lay down.”

Rust wordlessly pulls his boots off and slides ass-first onto the bed, keeping his arm held close to his stomach as he presses up against Marty’s left side, resting his head in the space between his neck and shoulder.

They’re quiet for a time, lulled under the spell of the ceiling fan, Rust listening to Marty’s breathing slow and even out until the other man finally opens his mouth to speak.

“Guess we’re making a regular thing out of this,” he says, voice vibrating faint along the seam between them.

Rust’s voice is tired, soft and warm against Marty’s cheek. “What’s that?”

“Y’know,” he says, working an arm around to palm the little dip below Rust’s ribcage. “Just being two old fuck-ups like we are, hobbling toward the light together.”  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two weeks [what feels like ten thousand lifetimes] and nearly 8,000 words later, here we are. FINALLY. To think you waited all that time for a hot mess of gratuitous emotion porn.
> 
> Other than that, I apologize for any discrepancies or inaccuracies regarding the medical and legal aspects throughout. I tried so hard to pin down the proper research but eventually figured "what the hell, this is fan fiction" and let shit slide. The next chapter will definitely be dealing with more investigation-related issues in regards to what happened with the mysterious gunman, so stay tuned to find out more about that.
> 
> Finally, here are the two poems that Rust and Marty read from the unnamed anthology:
> 
> [This Is Just To Say](http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/just-say) by William Carlos Williams
> 
> [Domestic](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179229) by Carl Phillips


	22. the magpie's nest

Rust sits in the dip of a waxing crescent, cross-legged on the office floor with a semicircle of files and shitty photocopies spread around him on the carpet. A loose curl flops over his forehead as his eyes sweep over the pictures, teeth busy chewing around a plastic pen cap crammed in the corner of his mouth.

Lark Dufresne’s brain had been spattered slap-dash against the living room wall and the remaining fragments of his thoughts look much in the same, manifested in chicken scratch scrawl through the pages of a spiral bound notebook. A lot like Dora’s had been, though this time bereft of colorful marker flourishes and long-lashed doe eyes cast toward a realm above and beyond. Dufresne’s pages are filled with lines of vaguely remembered verse, women, animals, birds—clothed and naked, dead and alive, whole and mutilated, no discrimination drawn between the two—, all sketched out in the same cramped hatch of fuck-addled shapes and lines.

It took thirteen flips through the stack of photocopies and two days before Rust saw the stars.

They’d looked like ink blots at first, wayward misfires of a pen, black pinpricks burst across the lined paper in haphazard buckshot. Flipping through the notebook one page at a time you’d never know the difference, but darkened and plotted on stacked tracing paper they’d started to take shape, coming together with pencil lines that Rust had rubbed away and redrawn again and again, following the old routes he’d learned outlining the nighttime horizon forty-something years before.

That was on Wednesday, the same day he’d booted up the laptop and gotten the number to call the observatory up in Baton Rouge. A couple more phone calls and a few faxes later the bones had started spelling out Dufresne’s fortune, boiling down to a constellation as seen from a southern arc in the northern sky.

Friday afternoon, Rust takes down a long flourish of numbers in his ledger and ends a call. Pulls himself up from the office floor and walks down the hall to poke his head into the open bathroom.

“Got the coordinates,” he says, and is gone again before Marty can yell _what?_

He walks back into the kitchen and pulls his phone from his shirt pocket, scrolling through the scant number of contacts until he lands on _G_.

“Cohle,” Gilbough says on the third ring, voice held flat and even on the other end of the line. “We hear you and Hart have been calling in some favors.”

Marty’s been home from the hospital running nigh on a week and sits in the bathtub down the hall, cast wrapped in a plastic sleeve with his foot propped up on a stool next to the toilet. Rust can hear him drizzling hot water from the faucet and leans back against the kitchen counter, slinged arm resting against his stomach.

“Yeah,” he says, pitching back just as easy. “Some anonymous benefactors swung by the house, mailed a few photocopies over. I had to get my hands on this shit somehow. You haven’t been as forthcoming with keeping us in the loop.”

“Figure that’s mostly because there hasn’t been much to go off of yet,” Gilbough says. “We got an ID, a place of residence, some personal items, but nothing pointing surefire back to the cult. He’s got a drug and assault record a mile long, pretty standard fare. Lifted some kind of journal but it’s full of strange shit, downright fuck-up of a mess. Looks like stuff you’d find scribbled on the boys’ bathroom wall in a middle school.”

He pauses, voice coming back tinged vaguely sour, orange bitters over melting ice. “Didn’t see anything about a Yellow King.”

“What kind of middle schools you been spending time in?” Rust asks, and Gilbough doesn’t crack, only breathes out sharp across the receiver.

“So tell me,” he says, and Rust can almost hear the regret edging through his words. “What is it you’ve got? Must be something good for you to call in like this.”

“Got a location figured from the journal,” Rust says, watching tree shadows dance on the kitchen floor through the sun-lit window. “The rest is something worth making the trip for.”

“You gonna play this game with us, Cohle?” Gilbough asks. “Again.”

“Mmhmm,” Rust hums, tempered casual. “Best rally up your partner and head on over come Monday. You’ve got the address.”

The other end of line is silent for a few beats. “What you two got going on tomorrow?”

“Not much, considering.”

“Figure this one might need a special touch. We’ll be in that neck of the woods anyhow, bright and early.”

Gilbough disconnects and Rust pads back down the hall to the bathroom, sitting on the closed toilet lid to lean back against the tank.

“Reckon you got enough of that shit in there?” he asks Marty, gently thumping the ankle of his cast with the tip of his middle finger.

“Might not even be enough,” Marty says with a snort, shifting under a fading cloud of white bubbles. When he pulls a hand up out of the water to splash over his chest and shoulders it looks broiled pink. “What’d Gilbough say?”

“Says they’re coming over tomorrow. You about done in here?”

“On a Saturday?” Marty asks, wrapping a sudsy hand around the forearm Rust offers him. “And yeah, let me pull the stop.”

Rust watches him lean forward and jimmy the lever, keeping their arms held steady. “Take your foot off the stool before you try to stand this time,” he says over the glugging suck of water spiraling down the drain. “If you break your damn hip I’m putting you in a home.”

Marty swings his cast down and gets his other leg up underneath him, pushing up as Rust pulls with his good arm.

“I’ll be sure to land on you, then,” he says, grinning and slapping a damp handprint over Rust’s stomach as he wraps up with a towel.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Three raps on the front door come in around ten o’clock the next day and Rust glances quick out the window before he spins the bolt and opens up. Gilbough and Papania stand on the front porch staring back at him against the bright backdrop of mid-morning, guardedly cool expressions already thrown up in place.

“Detectives,” he says, stepping aside so they can walk in. “How was the drive?”

“A pain in the ass,” Gilbough says at the same moment Papania blurts out, “Don’t you feel uneasy about staying here after what happened?”

Marty’s got his leg propped up in the living room recliner and snorts. “Please,” he says, grinning and grasping the hand Gilbough offers him. “It’d take a lot more than that to push a man out of his own house. Y’all want anything to drink?”

Rust stands in the kitchen, slinged arm braced across his front with the other hanging next to his side. His face looks vaguely alarmed, like he’s trying to recollect the right movements to evoke a proper response. A moment edges by and he reaches out to stiffly grip the fridge handle.

“Uh, we got water, ginger ale, orange juice,” he says, clearing his throat as he opens the door and peers into the light. “Coffee and tea, if you want.”

“Good for now,” Gilbough says with a little wave, but Papania’s features have scrambled up, scanning over the kitchen and living room in a perturbed kind of curiosity.

“What, no Lone Star, Old Milwaukee?” he asks, making sure to catch the corner of Rust’s eye. “And my Lord—you two got curtains put up in the damn windows.”

“We were slam outta gunnysack and newspaper to hang up,” Marty says, eyeballing the fabric before swerving around to land back on Papania. “The hell you think I was gonna put up there? You got something against curtains?”

“No,” Papania says more soberly, blinking and rocking back on his heels. “Not at all.”

Gilbough watches Rust swing the refrigerator shut and clears his throat. “Much as I wanted to make the trip for tea time at the HartCohle’s, we’re pretty eager to hear what it is, exactly, you felt you couldn’t share over the phone.”

Rust leans against the kitchen counter and sizes them up. “You wouldn’t have driven all the way out here on a weekend if you didn’t have a better reason. What kind of leads you following?” His mouth quirks up in the barest ridge of a smile. “Off the books, too.”

“Oh, you hadn’t set out on the trail yet?” Papania asks, eyebrows askew. “We must’ve gotten one up on the true detective, Mayn.”

Rust shrugs his good shoulder, drums his fingers once against the countertop. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

Gilbough’s hands disappear into his pockets, legs bracing into a stance that puts him at an angle to watch all three men in the room. “Turns out there might have been some associates,” he says. “Some people in the know. Might not turn anything up, but we’re curious to see who Dufresne was keeping company with.”

“Whereabouts these people holed up?”

Gilbough smiles. “Where indeed, Mr. Cohle. Where _indeed._ ”

“What the fuck are y’all doing right now, having a standoff in the kitchen?” Marty says, eyes darting between them. “I miss the elephant one of you drug into the room? Cough this shit up.”

“I don’t intend to step on anybody’s toes, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Rust says. “Seems to me like this could be a joint effort.”

“Why you holding out on us, then?” Papania asks, bracing a hip against the end of the counter with his arms crossed. “No reason this has to be—is that a—do you have a _cat?”_

Ghost has padded down the hall into the living room, fluffy tail held aloft like a black flag. She weaves around and rubs against Papania’s legs before hopping up onto the barstool next to him, trilling once with her green and yellow eyes tuned bright.

“Uh, yeah,” Marty says, coughing lightly and picking at some invisible lint on the arm of the recliner, voice gone a touch gruffer. “Rust, uh _—we_ got her out of the shelter.”

Papania gapes at her with some ounce of wide-eyed disbelief but reaches out to take the tag hanging from her collar between two fingers, reading the name stamped into the metal heart.

“Y’all call this cat ‘Babygirl’,” he says, voice rolled out flat. He slants a look over to Gilbough and shakes his head, dropping the tag to stare at a vacant spot on the wall. “I’m about to walk outta here right now. Walk the fuck on out.”

Rust breathes deep through his nose, eyes slipping shut. “Marty,” he says. “I thought you took that shit off.”

“I fuckin’ tried,” Marty says, voice fine-edged with a thread of hysteria. “She was fighting me the whole time—I couldn’t get it jimmied before she ran off.”

“Our receptionist,” Rust sighs, eyes sliding back open. “Shelley. She watched the cat while we were in the hospital. Her real name’s Ghost, but Shelley—calls her that.”

“I’ll bet she does,” Gilbough says, while Papania makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat. “Now tell me again; what you mean, ‘a joint effort’?”

“Exactly that,” Rust says, shifting back into his sedate expression with a blink. “If you drive, I’ve got the place we need to go. And you’re not getting there unless I tag along for the ride.”

“What?” Marty blurts out, single syllable winging sharp across the room. “The hell you’re going anywhere like that without me, walking right back into God knows what, probably some satanic shithole—and your fucking shot arm, Rust? Is still yoked around your goddamn neck.”

“Marty,” Rust starts, voice calm. “I need to—”          

“Yeah, we’re gonna be out front for a minute,” Gilbough cuts in, ushering his partner toward the door. “Need to—make a call. Take your time.”

The front door shuts behind them and Marty’s eyes are livid, the kind of fire so hot it burns blue. “You could have done me the courtesy and mentioned this before,” he says, rolling his jaw so hard it pops. “But then again, considering, I suppose I should have fuckin’ known from the start.”

Rust walks out from behind the counter and perches on the edge of the coffee table, knee almost brushing the foot of Marty’s cast. “You can’t get around right now and we gotta work fast,” he says, quiet. “I’ve already let it go a week—can’t let it go much longer. Might already be too late.”

“Too fucking late for what, Rust?” Marty asks, watching his own hands fist and uncurl on the armrests. “Getting yourself maimed again—maybe even killed?” He blows out a ragged sigh and catches Rust’s eye from the corner of his own, the fire there already beginning to burn back down to embers. “It ain’t worth it. It really ain’t.”

“This is important, Marty,” Rust says, half-wishing he could push the hollow haunt through the other man until it rattled in his bones. “It’s something I gotta see to—you know that.”

“Yeah, it’s important to you,” Marty says, eyes wavering along the edge of Rust’s jaw. “But you ever stop to think about what’s important to me?”

Their eyes meet again, this time two glaciers crashing and grinding together along a fault, and Rust feels his lungs constrict until something syrupy-hot bursts free up in the softness behind his ribcage, internal bleeding of a different kind.

“I’ll be all right,” he says, pitched soft, reaching out to let the fingers of his good hand brush Marty’s. “Word probably traveled up the grapevine. If Dufresne had friends I reckon they’ve scattered by now—be like walking into an empty tomb.”

“Jesus Christ, Rust,” Marty groans. “That’s the shit I’m afraid of.”

“I’ll have those two with me,” Rust says, nodding in the direction of the front porch. “They’re good at what they do—just as capable as the best of them, if not more, considering they actually give a fuck about all this.”

“What am I gonna do?” Marty says, pushing the words out fast like he’s planning on rethinking them. “If something happens to you.”

“Nothing,” Rust tells him, hooking three fingers around Marty’s palm. “Because nothing’s gonna happen.” He tries to smile reassuringly but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes, sits like a mask pulling too-tight around his mouth, an expression not often worn or practiced. “I’m unkillable, remember?”

Marty’s gaze drops down to their hands and stays there, tracing along the veins beneath Rust’s skin. “Don’t suppose I was ever able to keep you from doing anything you set your mind to,” he says, cutting his eyes to stare hard at the floor. “You know what it is you gotta do. Go right on ahead.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“What’s the word?” Papania asks from where he’s leaning against the car when Rust steps out into the morning. “You gonna tightfist this one or let us have it?”

“Little bit of both,” Rust says, squinting against the yellowness of day. Autumn’s begun to fall from the trees and he breathes it down deep, burnt orange and sweet dry decay. “I’m coming with you.”

Gilbough’s brow pinches together as his eyes flick over Rust, a tangible drag up and down his sweatpants and the unbuttoned flannel rolled up over his braced arm. “That so?”

“If you wanna find this fucking place, then yeah,” Rust says, following the weight of the other man’s gaze. “And don’t say shit about the sling, I’ve crawled out of ditches with a lot worse. At most I’d call it an inconvenience.”

“What’s Hart got to say about all this?” Papania asks. “Didn’t seem too pleased with your game plan.”

Rust reaches into his flannel pocket for his cigarettes on instinct and bites back a swear when he remembers the quarter-pack sitting on the kitchen counter. “That supposed to sway me at all?” he asks.

“No,” Papania says a little too fast, holding his hands up with the palms facing out. “I was just asking.”

Gilbough is studying Rust more closely now, features shifted down into something more graven. “You expect us to drive across Louisiana on a wild goose chase with you riding shotgun, looking for a place going off nothing but your own good word?”

“Yeah,” Rust says, staring back. “Seem to recall it working sometime before.”

Silence pools around them until Gilbough blinks. “And how far up the map would you be taking us?”

“Coordinates place it somewhere just outside Delhi.”

“Alright then,” Gilbough says after a moment, ignoring Papania as he throws his head back to laugh. “Get a bag together. I guess we’re about to wing up there on a shake and a prayer.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“I called Macie,” Rust says, coming down the hall with a small duffel in hand and his ledger tucked under one arm. “She’s gonna be here in about an hour or two, stay with you while I’m gone.”

“Jesus Christ, Rust, what’d you go and do that for?” Marty says, twisting around and knocking the TV remote off the arm of his chair. “She’s got better shit to do than sit around here and babysit my crippled ass.”

“They’re on fall break until Wednesday and she said she’s more than happy to come out,” Rust says, squatting down to hand the remote back to Marty. “Mentioned something about bringing some kinda recipe she thinks would be good for you.”

“Oh, God, you got me set up for misery right from the start,” Marty groans. “It’s gonna be some of that tofu shit she started eating in high school. Tastes like a wad of fucking Play-Doh.”

“Might be good for you,” Rust says, straightening on creaking joints until he’s standing next to the recliner. He clears his throat and gets the duffel back in hand, eyes resting on the top of Marty’s head. “I’ll have my phone,” he says, quieter. “You can call me.”

“Yeah, alright,” Marty says, snorting. “Like I’m gonna call you when I finally get some fucking peace around here, not having to watch you stalk around like a one-winged buzzard.”

“You need anything before I head out?” Rust asks, sniffing once as he takes quick survey of Marty’s small arsenal. “You got your scripts, crutches, phone, something to drink. What else?”

“Lean over here real quick,” Marty says after a few beats of quiet, reaching up to rest his hand on Rust’s hip. “One last thing.”

Rust blows out a sigh but leans over, feels Marty’s breath slide warm over his face just before their mouths come together, lingering in a brush of stubble and the soft bump of noses.

Marty pulls back and pops him once light on the hip. “Hurry up and get on home,” he says, watching as Rust throws up a two-fingered wave before disappearing through the front door.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“Got your MapQuest shit printed out?” Papania asks as Rust saunters toward the car, smirking and swinging the rear passenger door wide. He takes Rust’s duffel and passes it off to Gilbough who wedges it somewhere in the trunk. “Hop in.”

“I get carsick,” Rust says, deadpan, squinting over the roof of the car as he pats the cigarette carton in his breast pocket. “Can’t ride in the back.”

“It’s either that or we strap you to the roof,” Gilbough says, hanging one arm over the driver side door. He eyeballs Rust for a second and then nods back toward the house. “Well.”

Rust doesn’t move as his eyes cut over. “Well what?”

“Hart gonna be alright?”

Papania reaches up to scratch behind his ear and sniffs. “That was some sweet shit, man. Almost thought you were gonna propose.”

Rust drops down into the back seat without a word and reaches across himself to yank the door shut. Gilbough and Papania share a glance over the roof but follow suit, settling in and buckling up.

“He can see you through the front,” Papania says, voice almost cracking. “Just roll down the window and give him a little wave, Cohle.”

“Start the fucking car,” Rust says, staring straight ahead until Gilbough turns over the engine and rolls out of the driveway.

Five miles down the road the sound of a zippo sparking to life cuts through the cab and Gilbough’s eyes flash in the rearview. “The hell you think you’re doing?” he asks, and Papania’s face reels around to peer back over his shoulder.

Rust cracks the back window and flicks his lighter shut. “Trying to quit,” he says through the cigarette between his teeth, “but something about being around you two incites the urge like nothing else.”

“I swear,” Gilbough says, pulling an empty fast food cup out of the cup holder and emptying it out the window before throwing it toward the back seat. “You’re ponying up for a top notch car detail when we get back into town, Cohle—I’m talking the full-blown deal.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Rust says, blowing a stream of smoke out the window as the world flashes by in different shades of pending death.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The slow crawl toward Delhi drags on with the forward momentum of day, colored in by a sprawling vision of Louisiana that slides past in a flickering snapshots and the quiet lull of radio stations fading in and out. Gilbough and Papania hold they know their course and trace some empty leads up the 49 through Alexandria, arguing on and off until they find the back road they were looking for and swing off into a sparse trailer park shaded by a wilting canopy of oak and hickory.

Rust gets out and tastes the air, dank rot and mold growing up the sides of old campers and mobile homes that have collapsed here to live out their final days til death. The atmosphere seems tinted sepia like an aging photograph and there are children’s’ toys forgotten in a patch of dirt, a yellow plastic dump truck and an upended tricycle that Rust closes his eyes against and turns away from on second nature.

An older woman steps down out of a ragtag Winnebago, wearing a terrycloth robe over denim cutoffs and a shirt that pulls low and tight around her sagging chest. Caucasian with white-blonde hair, though her skin looks like tanned leather, baked deep brown and wrinkled by five or six good decades of sun worship. She glances cursory at Gilbough and Papania before turning an eye on Rust.

“What you boys wanting?” she asks, not bothering to pull her robe closed.

“Afternoon, ma’am,” Gilbough says, flashing his badge but not bothering to step forward. “We’re with state criminal investigation, looking for Darl Widdershoven. Hear he might be put up around these parts, supposedly keeps a mobile home parked here from time to time.”

“The hell he gotten into now?”

“Nothing, far as we know,” Papania says, keeping his hands held at his front. “We’re just interested in asking him some questions.”

“I ain’t no relation, but Darl run off just roundabout shy of a week ago,” she says, looking off into the tree line rather than at either detective. “Packed up and took the chillun with him.”

“Whose children—his?”

“Might as well be,” the woman says, pausing to cough up something yellow-wet before spitting it off to the side. “The mama ain’t good for nothing, had a slew with different daddies before she took up with Darl. You know how it go.”

“You know where they’re headed?” Papania asks, taking a step forward so a patch of sunlight darts over his face and disappears behind his head. “We were wondering about a friend of his, last name of Dufresne.”

The woman ignores him and focuses her attention back on Rust, shifting her weight over onto one hip and then back to the other. “What you asking for, again? I hadn’t heard nothing about nothing.”

Rust stares back at her, unblinking. “The detectives are asking the questions,” he says. “Ask them.”

“What you standing here for, then?” she snaps, eyeballing his sling. “How about all three of y’all get off my property ‘fore I call the sheriff down here. Ain’t nothing you need to know about Darl or his kin. Shouldn’t even have come out here, rooting around like a bunch of pawing mon—”

“Thanks for your time,” Gilbough says, nodding once before turning back toward the car.

Back in the air conditioning, Rust lights up a new cigarette as they turn out onto the main road. “Mmm,” he hums, pulling off a drag and tapping ash into the cup wedged between his thighs. “Almost like I’m working the old beat again.”

“How’s that?”

“Got the same look and feel,” he says, blowing smoke out the window. “Probably just as fuckin’ futile.”

“We got a couple more leads to follow yet,” Papania says, flipping through a folder in his lap. “Need to check up on Jaime Skelton and Dufresne’s cousin on his father’s side, goes by Wren.”

“Wren and Lark,” Rust says, and Papania stops his paper shuffling.

“What?”

“Wren and Lark,” Rust repeats, glancing down halfways at the black vulture needle-beat into his skin. “They’re both birds.”

Gilbough comes to a rolling stop at sign before driving on through. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“They have a nest,” Rust says, sucking off another pull. “You won’t find Wren. He’s already flown the coop.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The first text buzzes in a little after three when Rust is standing at a jiffy store checkout just outside Catahoula, dropping an armful of chip bags onto the counter before pointing at the cigarettes on display behind the clerk.

“Pump three and a pack of Camel Blues,” he says, ignoring the phone to palm his wallet. The two twenties Gilbough passed his way get pocketed and he slips a fifty across the counter, nodding as the girl working the till watches him drop the cigarettes into his shirt pocket before somehow gathering up all three bags of chips in one hand.

Papania is already back from the bathroom and watching Gilbough pump gas, wiping his damp hands over his thighs as he watches Rust walk out. “Jesus, I had to piss,” he says, leaning up against the ticking warmth of the car. “Can’t go through a fucking sixer and hold it all damn day like you, Cohle.”

“One of my many talents,” Rust says, tossing a chip bag Papania’s way. “That what you wanted?”

“The hell is this?” Papania asks, reading the label. “You better hand over the barbecue or salt and vinegar, only old white people eat this baked hummus cracked pepper shit.”

“Well shit, my bad,” Rust snorts, passing him a different bag in exchange for the other. “Guess those are mine.”

“Nuh-uh, pass them this way,” Gilbough says, throwing Papania a sideways look as he gives the gas pump a few more final jimmies. “You better step off, son. Cracked pepper is delicious.”

When they load back up in the car and merge into traffic Rust hears his phone buzz again, this time reaches down to fumble it out of his pocket. Marty’s name and number flash across the screen before he opens up the new messages with a swipe of his thumb.

_3:13 PM: what are u doing_

_3:20 PM: they been talking shit all day?_

Rust’s lip quirk up at the edges as he taps out a reply—

_3:21 PM: Ever since we pulled out of the driveway._

He tears one of the chip bags open with his teeth, not bothering to check the flavor before bringing one up to his mouth. His phone buzzes once more and again, and he mashes a series of buttons on the side, trying to remember how to turn it down on silent.

_3:23 PM: figured_

_3:24 PM: how many smokes u gone through_

Papania swallows a mouthful of chips and takes a swig off his drink. “You back there sending Hart dirty messages or something?”

“Telling your mama I’ll have you home before midnight,” Rust says, sending _A lot._ back to Marty.

Papania whistles low and lets out a little laugh. “I’ll tell you what, my woman hasn’t called me once all day. Didn’t even get outta bed to see me off.”

“I wouldn’t call your ass neither,” Gilbough says. “She’s probably glad to finally have you out of the house.”

“Whereabouts you think you’re gonna find Skelton and Dufresne?” Rust asks. “Wanted to hit Delhi and get settled in before dark.”

“Last we heard they both had bases here in Catahoula,” Gilbough says. “Dufresne’s grandmamma supposedly lives this way, used to put him up a lot when he was out on bail. Whole clan’s scattered from here to Timbuktu, always moving around.”

“They do that,” Rust says, more to himself than anybody listening. He opens up his ledger and begins tracing over constellations inked into the ivory white, closing his eyes to see them thrown up on a wide ream of blackness.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


As it turns out, Widdershoven, Skelton, and Wren Dufresne have all three collectively fallen off the map, seemingly burst into ash and scattered on the passing wind.

“Well,” Papania says later that night, dragging a French fry through the paltry smear of ketchup on his burger wrapper. “This was a fucking bust.”

They’re gathered around a picnic table situated outside a fast food joint just off the 20, Gilbough and Papania working through combo meals as the sound of passing traffic echoes off the concrete buildings. Rust sits with his notebook cracked open, idly working the straw up and down in a small strawberry shake that’s had two sips taken out of it.

“How we tapping this hotspot of yours?” Gilbough asks, swirling some ice around the bottom of his cup. “Here we are. Fifteen miles outside Delhi. Don’t know shit from Shinola about any happenings up here, so I hope you got your plan together unless we came all this way for double cheeseburgers and a milkshake.”

Rust pulls a printed diagram sheet out of his ledger and pushes it across the table. “You recognize that?”

“Looks like a constellation.”

“Cassiopeia,” Rust says, pitched low, drumming the edge of the paper with his middle finger. “The Queen, the Lady in the Chair.”

Papania crumples his wrapper and picks up the paper, studying the printout before flicking his eyes back to Rust. “What she got to do with any of this mess?”

“All that shit scrawled in Dufresne’s journal, the ink blots,” Rust says, producing a photocopy of one of the pages and flattening it on the table. “They were stars, plotted out on the page one at a time. Shedir, Caph, Epsilon, Rho—all right there. Copy them onto tracing paper, layer them on top of one another, you get Cassiopeia.”

“You said something about coordinates,” Gilbough says, eyes whetted sharp. “How’d you get them figured?”

“Thinking Dufresne drew his stars from somewhere up here,” Rust says, making a gesture that seems to encompass the surrounding swathe of night. “The way the stars line up, you can get an idea of where he was looking. Feedback loop narrowed it down to about a square mile just outside Delhi.”

“Fucking A,” Papania says, slapping his hand down on top of the papers as he leans back from the table, but Gilbough doesn’t budge.

“Why Cassiopeia?”

Rust picks up his shake and sucks up a mouthful of melted pink, lets it slide cool and smooth down his throat. “Can’t say for sure,” he says. “Could be that every king needs his queen.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


They bed down for the night five minutes from the burger joint, Gilbough and Papania splitting cost between a double with Rust taking up residence in the room next door. He’s trying to work his room card through the reader when his phone buzzes.

“Want an early start in the morning,” he says as Gilbough swings his and Papania’s door open. “Got a full day ahead.”

“Night, Cohle,” Papania says, and with a half-assed salute both men disappear into their room.

Rust walks in and sets his bag down, immediately starts up the shower and sinks down on the edge of the bed to unzip his boots as water beats against ceramic in the bathroom. The new message blinks green until he gets his socks pulled off and unhooks his sling, letting his arm rest at an angle in his lap. There are a handful of unread texts waiting in a logjam behind it.

_9:42 PM: u remember to eat today_

_9:54 PM: macie tried to feed me some of that tofu shit_

_9:54 PM: couldn’t do it, had to make a sandwich. used the rest of your cheese_

_10:03 PM: where y’all camping out tonight_

Rust sighs heavy and writes out a reply before setting his phone down and padding to the bathroom, fingers already busy thumbing at the buttons on his flannel.

_10:08 PM: Staying at a Best Western off I20. Just got in._

He’s lathering shampoo into his hair when the next one comes in—

_10:10 PM: cat keeps crying for you man, I think she misses you_   
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Rust manages to reach his phone by the fifth ring, fumbling it up off the bedside table and wedging it between his ear and shoulder, wet curls clinging damp around his ears.

“Hey,” he says, pulling the sheet back on the bed one-handed. “What’s up?”

“Me,” Marty says, and Rust hears something that sounds like a plastic wrapper crumpling vaguely on the other end of the line. “Waiting for your ass to call me. You said you got in like half an hour ago.”

“I did,” Rust says, tossing most of the pillows to the empty side of the bed before settling down and swinging his legs up. “Went straightaway to get outta these driving clothes and take a shower.”

“Mmm,” Marty hums, and if Rust closes his eyes he can see him plain as day, propped up in bed with a magazine open on his lap, reading glasses settled on his forehead while the bedside lamp burns golden yellow. “You about ready for bed, then? They must’ve worn you out.”

“I’m there now,” Rust says, reaching over to click off the lamp so soft grey darkness drapes over the room. He slips his sling off and braces a pillow up under his arm so it’s tucked against his side. “Macie must’ve sent you to bed early.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t fixing to complain,” Marty breathes out. “She started up some kinda fuckin’ movie out in the living room—about this treasure hunter guy down in Florida, had some kinda sissy mermaid girl tattooed on his arm. Got through about twenty minutes and had to call it a night.”

“Yeah,” Rust says, subdued. “What’re you doing now?”

“Nothing,” Marty says, pitched sullen. Silence beats on the other end of the line for a few moments and then his voice is coming back, carefully hushed, fine-edged with a tone Rust knows like the back of his hand.

“So…what are you wearing?”

Rust blows out a sigh and lets his lashes fall, wedging the phone back up by his ear so it rests on the pillow. “What do I usually wear to bed, Marty?”

“Not a stitch,” Marty says, and almost sounds relieved. “Listen man, I’m wound up tighter than an eight-day clock. Been thinking—been thinking about you a lot, not even just today…but maybe a lot today. I dunno. Being laid up like this has got me so fucking low.”

“I haven’t even been gone twelve hours,” Rust says. “You ain’t dying.”

“Might be,” Marty says, getting quiet again. “Especially thinking about you, naked as a jaybird, sprawled out on those white hotel sheets—”

“What the hell you doing, Marty?” Rust asks, but Marty keeps right on talking.

“Wish I was there with you,” he says. “Wish I could be there to touch you, Rust, without this fucking cast, no sling—just the two of us, y’know. Get you stretched out on your stomach maybe, get those legs spread, cop a handful of that ass before I start working you open one finger at a time.” He pauses, seemingly fallen off track for a moment. “God, you’ve got the best ass. Sweet as a fucking peach.”

Marty rasps hot in his ear and Rust’s hand slides down his chest and stomach, moves on its own accord to palm around the hardening line of his dick. He thinks back to a different time—spread out across the bed with his breath coming fast and damp against the sheets, Marty pressing him down into the mattress, mouth open against the back of his neck—and his breath hitches light in his chest, just once, and that’s all it takes to give him away.

Marty’s voice comes back rough, honed sharp enough to cut the airspace between then. “You…you touching yourself, Rust?” he asks. “For me.”

“Yeah,” Rust says, drawing one leg up through the sheets. “Yeah, Marty.”

“Good,” Marty says, blowing out a shuddering breath as something rustles around him in the background. “Keep on. I’m gonna—gonna try and talk you through it.”

“Don’t you dare put me on fuckin’ speaker,” Rust says, trying to temper his breathing. “I don’t want your daughter or the damn cat hearing any of this shit.”

“She ain’t,” Marty murmurs. “They ain’t. Just—listen to me, yeah? Think about me touching you, gettin’ you ready—you can’t even hardly take it, all those fucking little noises you make, thighs starting to shake. Fucking wrecks me every time, Rust.”

Rust’s hand is dragging up his dick now, hot and heavy in his hand. He blows out a ragged sigh that rattles in the receiver, and Marty sounds breathless on the other end of the line.

“What’re you thinking,” he says. “Tell me what you’re feeling right now.”

“Don’t know what the fuck you want me to say,” Rust rasps, trying to keep his bad arm stable as his thighs begin to tense, hand keeping up a slow and steady rhythm. “Never was much good at talking on the phone.”

“I don’t care what the fuck you say,” Marty says. “It’s at the point where you washing dishes gives me a goddamn hard-on these days. C’mon, man—just talk to me.”

“Christ,” Rust says, bottom lip snaring between his teeth. His eyes flutter shut as he thumbs over the head of his dick and slicks through a pearl of precum, hips already rearing to buck. “So fuckin’ wet for you, Marty,” he says, letting the words roll thick off his tongue. “Already got me so wet.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Marty’s voice shudders, flayed open in Rust’s ear. “You’re gonna kill me, playing like that. Wasn’t—wasn’t fucking ready, oh fuck, c’mon now.”

“Thinkin’ about,” Rust breathes out, “thinking about riding you raw—just taking it all, Marty, much as I can.”

“Yeah,” Marty says, breath coming fast now in even time with Rust’s jerking. “Let you have it all. Wouldn’t stop until you were shaking, Rust, fuck up into you so good—”

“Shit,” Rust says, biting down into his lip as his movements start going ragged. “Oh fuck.”

“Pull you down harder,” Marty keeps on, mindless now, “so fucking tight and sweet, watching you ride me, riding hard and taking it so damn pretty—saying my name, c’mon Rust, say it for me one time—”

“Marty,” Rust groans, “Marty, fuck, _Marty._ ” With one more full tug he hits the peak, feels his thighs tremble and snap together as his toes curl up in the sheets, lets the bright heat rip through him until it pushes past his teeth, manifesting in a strangled yell that rattles hard against every corner of the room. And with that Marty’s going and gone, swearing a dirty blue streak into the receiver as he jerks himself through it.

When the world sharpens back into focus Rust is panting hard with a hot mess on his chest and stomach, laying there limp and half-shaking with the phone still miraculously wedged up close to his ear. Marty’s breathing is starting to calm on the other end, and he laughs, hoarse and winded into the receiver.

“God damn,” he says. “I bet you just woke up half the hotel.”

“Shit,” Rust says, already blinking sleepy against the dark. “Can’t fucking believe we just did that.”

“Well believe it,” Marty says, crooked smile bleeding through the airspace between then. “If I knew this is what it’d take to get you talking I would’ve done it fifteen odd years ago.”

“Sure you had a lot of keen interest in the shit I was saying back then.”

“Mmm,” Marty hums, teasing. “Talk some of that sweet n’ dirty cowboy philosophy to me, baby.”

“Air’s funny up here,” Rust deadpans back, slurring soft around the _s_. “Cheap air freshener, dirty swamp ass, like you can taste the—”

He doesn’t even finish before Marty sputters and starts roaring laughing down the line.  
  
  
  


One door down the hall, the room is dark and dead silent, the only luminescence a sliver of moonlight peeking in between a thin crack in the curtains. Thomas Papania is awake—has been awake for the past half-hour—, and turns over on his side facing away from the wall, chancing a glance into the blackness.

He looks and finds the vague glow of two white eyes staring back at him, set far back and the only visible features of his partner’s face.

“Did you fucking hear that shit?” he asks, tossing the words across the space between their beds. “You hear the name?”

“Was trying not to,” Gilbough says, and rolls over onto his back without another word to stare up at the ceiling.

A few moments of silence edge past and Papania’s voice is breaking back in, just above a harsh whisper. “I fucking knew it,” he says. “Fucking knew it since Hart walked into CID that day.  Cohle must’ve been too drunk to figure, used to playing charades, but it was spelled clear across Hart’s face.”

“Not like it’s any kind of mystery now,” Gilbough says, and then clears his throat. “We ain’t talking about this anymore.”

“Clear as day, Mayn.”

“Shut the hell up already, I’m tryin' to forget.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Rust finds Papania and Gilbough at continental breakfast the next morning just after sunup, already working steady through coffee, sausage, and a plate of Danishes. He sets a cup of coffee down on the table before walking back up to the bar, coming back with a plate of toast and fresh fruit before dropping down into a chair.

“Sleep good?” Gilbough asks from behind his coffee, watching Rust butter his toast one-handed.

“Decent,” he says, not looking up. “You?”

“Had a hard time drifting off,” Papania says, dumping a packet of creamer into his coffee. He has to pause a moment to gather his breath, voice wound up tight. “Somebody down the hall was gettin’ a little loud.”

When Rust lifts his gaze back up Papania is biting hard into his bottom lip, thumbing at the corner of one eye as he brings his coffee up to his mouth. Gilbough’s hand has come up to pinch the bridge of his nose, line of sight cast down toward his lap.

“Mmm,” Rust hums mildly, pouring sugar into his own cup before picking up a plastic stirrer. “And to think y’all didn’t even get the full show. Lucky Marty wasn’t here.”

There’s a strangled sucking sound as Papania inhales and spits coffee back into his mug, coughing and sputtering as it sloshes slap-dash onto the table and down the front of his shirt.

“You already checked out?” Rust asks, swallowing a mouthful of brew as Papania grabs a handful of napkins and presses them to his shirtfront, still coughing. “We need to get a move on. This place isn’t gonna be a fucking roadside attraction.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The coordinates Rust plugs into the GPS pull them further up the map to a flat plane of land just outside Delhi. The car cuts down a ribbon of rough asphalt running parallel to a cane field that eventually gives way to hard-packed dirt and backwoods growth, dense and wild as anything sprung up from the earth.

The last ramshackle house they saw was around two miles back and the only telephone pole to be found stood crooked and dormant, shooting up out of the ground like a forgotten totem planted at the head of the overgrown cane field.

Sandy dirt bleeds into untouched grass and Gilbough slows the car before he hits the borderland, peering ahead into the pine forest laid out in front of them.

“Well,” he says. “What now?”

“We gotta hoof it,” Rust says, already pulling up his door lock and setting foot outside. “Ain’t gonna be out in the open.”

The air around them feels hollow, tinny, like it’d ring metallic if you struck it with a hammer. Rust reminds himself it’s breathable and adjusts his sling, squinting out into the midmorning. “This is it,” he says, turning in a semicircle. “This is the right place.”

“Both of you are packing, right?” he asks after a moment, watching Papania lift his shirt up to expose the gun on his hip while Gilbough pats his right side.

Rust’s own gun is tucked against the small of his back, a familiar, heavy weight of skin-warmed metal. “I’m not much of a shot with my left hand but I can squeeze one off in a pinch,” he says. “Wouldn’t hurt to be ready on the draw.”

“How far back you think this place sits?” Gilbough asks, eyeballing the pines looming above. “What are we even looking for?”

“Cassiopeia was a queen,” Rust says, pulling his phone from his pocket and squinting at the single service bar before dialing the only number he knows by heart. “A castle. A throne. We’ll know it when we see it.”

The dial tone rings eight times and then goes straight to voicemail. “Marty,” he says, stepping over the threshold between the clearing and tree line. “We found it.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“Motherfuck,” Marty hisses, hoisting himself up off the commode and knocking one of his crutches to the floor in the process. “Shit, shit—Macie!” he calls, yanking his cutoff sweatpants up over his cast and hips. “Get the phone—the phone’s ringing!”

The ringtone cuts out from the bedroom and then Macie’s voice is speaking faintly muffled on the other side of the door. “You okay in there?” she asks, words thrumming louder like she’s pressing them along the seam. “I thought I heard something crash.”

“I’m fine,” Marty says, flushing the toilet and rinsing his hands before swinging the door open. “Who was it that called?”

“Rust,” Macie says, holding the phone in her hand. “It looks like he left a voicemail.”

“Jesus,” Marty says, taking the phone and opening the voicemail, leaning heavy in the doorway. “Honey, can you please—?” he mumbles, letting her edge past him to pick up the fallen crutch as he presses the phone flush against the side of his head.

_9:27 AM_

_Marty, we found it. Somewhere out in the woods, we’re walking there now. The air’s just the same, I know this is the place, it’s like—_

The message stops there, cut off clean in a neat edge between words. Marty plays it again and then stares at the phone in his hand, gnawing steady on the inside of his cheek.

“What’d he want?” Macie asks, wedging the retrieved crutch back under Marty’s arm. “Is he all right?”

“I’m headed to the bedroom,” he says, careful, already crutching down the hall. “Go on back to whatever you were watching. Need to call him back real quick.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“The air’s just the same,” Rust says as Gilbough and Papania crunch through the pine needles behind him. “I know this is the place, it’s like they fucking bottle and sell the look and feel of it all. Uncanny shit.”

His phone shrills once and the call drops from the air, no signal bars left standing on the display screen.

“Fuck,” Rust says, glancing back over his shoulder. “Either of you got service still?”

“Nope,” Papania says, waving his phone through the air before slipping it back in his pocket. “Dead as a doornail.”

Rust swears under his breath and steps around a cluster of fungus clinging to a rotting log, keeping his slinged arm tucked close against his stomach. “Let’s hope we don’t gotta make a call,” he says, and then stops dead in his tracks.

Gilbough and Papania slow at either side and follow his line of sight about seven feet into the air, coming to a collective halt on the trunk of a pine that’s had the brittle bark peeled back to the raw quick.

The elements have darkened and weathered the shape with time, but there’s no mistaking the spiral carved crude into the hull of the tree.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


_9:33 AM_

_Rust? Rust—Jesus, I got your message, but it sounded like you cut out or something. Are you alright? Wish you would’ve fucking told me where you are, texted the coordinates or something before running off on a goddamn crusade. Got my phone now. Call me back._   
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“These motherfuckers think of everything?” Papania asks, staring up at the spiral. “Wall murals. Tree carvings. Making crowns out of fucking twigs and shit. Like satanic white men boy scouts.”

“They like to advertise,” Rust says, stepping past the pine to move deeper into the forest. The sunlight slants down in an angle from the east, cutting through the sparse autumnal foliage like softened butter.

“You sure this is the right direction?” Gilbough asks, keeping one hand hitched near his right hip.

“Yes,” Rust says, and keeps straight ahead.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


_9:54 AM_

_Hey man, this is Ma—uh, Hart. Noticed Rust tried to leave me a message but it didn’t come through all the way. He where you can see him? Need to hear back from him, so give him a shout when you get a chance, tell him I called. I’m gonna try Papania in a few minutes. Thanks._   
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The forest condenses and darkens the further they go. Sunlight still filters down from above in a warm glow but the trees are older, closer together, and cover the ground in a thicker blanket of needles that sprawls like carpet underfoot.

Birds call out to one another across the thin air of morning, sparse and hindered, like children afraid of being caught yelling before the rest of the house wakes up.

“Don’t feel right out here,” Gilbough says, shoulder almost brushing Papania’s as they walk. “Like we shouldn’t be here.”

“Don’t think anybody should,” Papania says, quiet, before Rust can even open his mouth.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


_10:05 AM_

_Papania, it’s Hart. Did all three of you lose service in one fell swoop? Rust ain’t picking up, neither is your partner, Christ—y’all better not be at some strip joint, Rust doesn’t know how to tip worth a damn if you take him to a titty bar. Tell him I said that and watch his face, looks like he’s sucking on a lemon. Alright—well, anyways. Give me a call when you can, or have Rust do it. I’ll catch you later._   
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“You see that?” Gilbough says, suddenly drawn up closer to Rust’s right side. “Like it’s cleared out up there.”

“Yeah,” Rust breathes, walking at the same pace but more surefooted than before, hand pressed flat against his stomach. The air feels thicker, lined with something vaguely bitter, hushing more and more as they get closer until the birds cut out altogether.

They step cautious out into the clearing, and Rust thinks of deer emerging from their winter thickets into newborn spring, ears pricked, poised to spring away at the first ring of a shot. The trees have been felled in a rough circle, just enough to clear space for the weatherworn ruins of what looks like the foundation of an old shack, and they walk through empty air until one step rings hollow with a metallic thud.

“Under the pine needles,” Rust says, half-hoarse, already kicking the foliage away. “Here—clear it off, get that shit off there.”

Gilbough and Papania sweep away the rest of the covering until they’re left staring down at twin iron doors set into rough concrete, hatched into place on rusting hinges.

“My God,” Papania says. “Thought you said we were looking for a fucking castle. This is—”

“A dungeon,” Rust says, already reaching for the blistered handle.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


_10:22 AM_

_Where the fuck are you? Rust, listen, I’m getting—Christ, I’m getting scared. Scared as fuck right now. Almost been an hour since you first called, I don’t know what the fuck to do, don’t fucking know if you’re alright, I don’t—shit._

_What am I gonna do if something happened? If I wasn’t there this time. God, you shouldn’t have…fuck, you shouldn’t have gone. I’d never fucking forgive myself._

_You gotta call me back. Please._   
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The doors swing up out of the forest floor and they’re left looking at a rough-hewn set of stairs, leading down to somewhere veiled beneath a deepening drape of shadow.

“I’ll be lookout,” Papania says on reflex, taking a step back, hand wrapped tight around his gun. “You two go on ahead.”

“I ain’t going down there without a light,” Gilbough says, staring down into the blackness. “I’ll be damned.”

“Either one of you got one of them flashlight things on your phone?” Rust says, taking the first two steps down. “Hand it here.”

“Take mine,” Papania says, fishing it out of his pocket and pressing it into Rust’s hand once the light is burning. The line of his throat works as he swallows, eyes swiveling to watch the forest surrounding them. “You got—you got any fucking idea what’s down there, man?”

“Not really.” Rust maneuvers the phone into his right hand and pulls his gun free with the left, already descending at an angle. “Can’t be anything good,” he says. “About to find out.”

Gilbough claps a hand against Papania’s shoulder before he moves to follow. “You gonna owe me one on this shit,” he says, blowing out a deep breath before steadying his gun and turning to follow Rust under the earth.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


_10:47 AM_

_Fuck, I know you’d answer if you could, I know something—God damn it, where are you?_

_Listen…did I ever tell you about that time back in ’95? When you went undercover into that biker joint? And beforehand all I could think to myself was my God, he’s gonna fuckin’ shatter. You were so fucked up, Rust. And I can’t remember how long I sat in that parking lot but then I went in looking for you—like it would’ve done any fucking good. But I was scared, man. And I’d—I’d never been that kind of scared for somebody before. Not like that._

There’s a pause, a breath drawn in that splits and unravels around the edges. The remaining words tumble out over the recording like shards of broken china.

_You don’t think it can get any worse, you know? But it does. And I—I need you, man. I do. Come home._   
  
  
  


* * *

The air below is chilled, heavy with the scent of damp earth and laced with the telltale aroma of something sickly-sweet, faint but lingering like perfume daubed on the edge of a handkerchief. The staircase draws them deeper into the belly of the darkness and the only thing Rust can see are his own two feet and a paltry circle of light spilling down the stairs, everything beyond that shrouded with velvet black.

He hits hard-packed ground and steps aside, waiting for Gilbough to make landfall before moving any further.

“Stay close,” Rust murmurs, and they move across the room in staggered formation, stepping small into the weak throw of light coming off the cell phones. The emptiness seems to stretch on for all eternity and counting, one long expanse of nothing, and then the floor gives way to something else, soft and sifted that scuffs and slides under their boots.

“The fuck is that?” Gilbough mutters, shining his light closer toward the ground, and it looks like ash, littered with shards and fragments of what might be charred wood or shale or maybe something else altogether.

Rust’s heart pounds like thunder in his chest as they walk around a slab of smooth stone dropped into the dirt, stacked up atop a crude pedestal of rock, and something bigger looms ahead, vast and vaulted up high, and they’re not close enough to figure it yet—not enough light, never enough—but then metal squeals shrill and daylight is waterfalling down into the darkness, illuminating the room with a bleeding burst of mote-speckled yellow.

“Don’t shoot me, I found another hatch,” Papania’s voice is calling down from above. “Y’alright?”

“Yeah,” Gilbough yells back, almost winded, cell phone pressed hard into his chest just below his heart. He finds Rust in the new light and stares, bolted steadfast to the ground. “We—we found—oh shit, man, it’s down here alright. It’s down here.”

“Found what?” Papania calls. “What is it?”

Rust has moved beyond the stone slab to stand in front of what looks like a chair carved out of limestone, mounted up high under guise of being a hand-wrought throne. The queen herself sits lashed there, slumped over in the seat and draped in rotted ribbons of purple cloth that might have once been muslin, empty eye sockets cast heavenward with a halo of woven vine fanned out behind the smooth roundness of her skull.

Offerings of flesh and bone and more lay scattered around her, shriveled and sunken under the weight of time, trussed up and presented like gifts set at her feet. There are dried flowers and polished stones, rough carvings and stick-woven traps, a throng of colorful glass bottles and flight feathers scattered around like treasures stolen to decorate the magpie’s nest.

Rust moves closer and steps up on the platform to look at the queen, sitting there with her jaw unhinged in a perpetual scream, and finds a piece of paper wadded up and pressed into the claw of her hand, still fresh and relatively unblemished by the cold and dark.

“Don’t know if we should be touching any of this,” Gilbough says, but Rust has already reached out and plucked the paper from her grasp, stepping down off the stone platform before he smoothes it out against his thigh.

He brings the square of newsprint up closer to his face, angling so the light from the hatch comes in over his shoulder, and finds a 2012 headline beat out in black bold: **_Former Detectives Unearth Occult Serial Murderer Nearly Two Decades Later_**

Scissors have edged careful around the headline and accompanying photo, and there in his hand is the snapshot of him and Marty from ‘95, pulled out of the archives and reprinted seventeen years later because he refused to have his picture taken for any press after Childress, laid up in a hospital bed on the borderland between life and willful death.

Him and Marty.

He turns—looks at the stone slab, the flat, oblong shape of it—and tastes blood.

The world bows in at the edges and Rust doubles over at the waist, feeling his stomach clench hard as bile surges up to scald the back of his throat. He chokes ugly and swallows against it, racking with dry heaves that won’t bring anything up, trying to blink through the flourishes of light bursting across his field of vision.

“Hey hey hey, Cohle, you alright?” Gilbough asks, reaching out into the space between them as Rust breathes hard through his nose and draws back up, still standing inside the showering vision.

_“Rust,_ ” Gilbough says this time, and Rust is only vaguely aware of the other man’s hand gripping his shoulder hard.

“We have to go,” he says, pressing the newspaper into the heart of his palm. “I need to get home.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


When Macie walks into the bedroom she finds Marty propped on his side facing the wall, quite still save for the gentle rise and fall of his rib cage, lulled and steady.

She walks around to the bedside and stands in front of him, watching as his eyes flick up to meet hers. They’re too-bright and glassy, wrought with something wet and ugly, something she’s never seen there before but which has the unmistakable look of a person drowning.

“Dad?” she says, almost a whisper. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, baby,” Marty says, but he bridges the gap between them anyways, takes her hand in his and presses his thumb into it, closes his eyes and holds on tight. “I’m alright.”

He doesn’t move then, doesn’t hardly breathe, and she tries again, this time pulling a word free that she hasn’t formed in probably fifteen years. “Daddy?” she asks, and the word by itself seems to yank a weak sob loose, something he tries to disguise as a shuddering breath as it rattles in the air between them.

“I’m alright,” he repeats again as Macie sits on the edge of the bed in front of him. “Don’t you worry none. I’m alright.”

“Where’s Rust?” she asks, and this time he breaks.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The moment they step outside the tree line and into the clearing all three phones chime into life, buzzing and chirping as notifications roll back in on a wave of reception.

Rust has four voicemails, every single one of them from Marty, and he doesn’t waste any time punching his passcode in before stalking off beyond the car, swearing under his breath as the answering service spits out the number and time stamp before the most recent message.

_“Rust?”_ a voice starts in—petal-soft and quiet, a gentler echo of Maggie—and Rust can feel the pulse throbbing hard in his neck, heady and violent. _“It’s Macie. I need—I need you to call me back as soon as you can. Something’s happened to dad.”_

Her voice fights not to unravel and Rust’s knees feel like they’re going to buckle, give way right there and send him toppling down into the dust.

_“He’s not in a good way right now. I don’t know what happened, but he—he needs you, I think. I’m so worried. Just—call me back, alright? I hope you’re okay.”_

“Cohle?” Papania calls out from by the car. “We got a couple messages from Hart, sounds like something serious. Call him back, we’re calling this shit in to the station now.”

Rust doesn’t hear Papania or Gilbough, doesn’t even listen to the three remaining voicemails before he’s punching in Marty’s number, pacing in a closed circuit as the dial tone mocks him on the other end.

“Rust,” Macie’s voice answers on the third ring. “Thank God, I thought—”

“Where is he?” Rust says, deadly quiet. “What happened?”

“He’s right here, and I don’t know, but he’s been trying to get a hold of you for—”

“Put him on the phone.”

There’s some brief shuffling and the sound of fabric brushing over the receiver, and then Rust is saying, “Marty? Are you there? What’s wrong?”

“You motherfucker,” Marty finally rasps out, and the words hit Rust like two top-shelf ludes, make his body sag where it stands. “Thank God. Thank _God._ ”

Rust is squeezing his phone hard enough to splinter it. “Are you alright?” he asks, and Marty laughs frail, weak and brittle-boned.

“I am now,” he says. “I will be. Just do me a favor and get on home.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Later that evening, just on the cusp of falling dusk, a car turns into the driveway back in Lafayette and idles while Rust steps out onto the pavement, grinding a cigarette under his heel as Papania helps him pull his duffel out of the back seat.

“You sure you’re ready to retire off the beat, man?” he asks, moving in to grasp Rust’s hand. “Color me continually impressed.”

“I think you and Gilbough can take it from here,” Rust says, gently squeezing his hand before dropping it. “You better get on back to HQ—he’s got all the files there with him, right?”

“Yeah,” Papania says, and watches Rust for a moment. “Listen man, I’ve said this before, but we really owe you one. Double-time, now.”

“Figure I’d call it even,” Rust says, and starts walking back up to the house before turning slight, standing there silhouetted against the lights bleeding out the windows. “You know where to find me, though.”

Papania watches him walk into the house before he folds himself into the car, shaking his head as he backs out onto the street.

  
  
  
  


Rust drops his bag as soon as he shuts the front door behind him, not breaking in stride or momentum as he walks through the empty living room and down the hall, Ghost trotting hot on his heels.

Macie meets him in the doorway and doesn’t say a word, though her fingers skim light over Rust’s arm as she steps past him to breeze down the hall, eyes catching his weak smile as she goes. Marty’s in bed with a couple pillows propping up his leg, head lolled off to one side in a light doze, and only blinks awake when Rust walks around and sinks down on his knees at the side of the bed.

“Don’t know if I’ve ever been this happy to see your stupid face,” Marty, blinking a little faster than usual. “Spent the whole damn morning thinking you’d—that you were—”

“I didn’t,” Rust says, and picks up Marty’s hand before pressing his mouth against the inside of his wrist, soft, without any shame. “I’m not.”

The pulse beats soft there and Rust closes his eyes against it, focusing on the gentle jump of blood pumping under Marty’s skin, the echoing taste of something amber-orange, bitterly hot and saccharine sweet and dizzyingly familiar, alive, alive, alive.

“You better get up here,” Marty rasps, pulling him up halfway, and all Rust tastes this time is _mine._

   
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final word count sits at just over 11K, consider me dead and gone, please scatter my ashes to the wind and carry out my final will and testament. Thinking it's a goddamn miracle I'd already written the chapter that comes after this one because I'm gonna need a freaking sabbatical. (So look for chapter 23 a week from now, rather than the usual two!)
> 
> Blood, sweat, and tears y'all. I hope it was worth it. As per always, Allie has managed to save the day with her constant pep talks and wonderful editing, so if you see anything here you like, she helped make it happen.
> 
> Thank you & good night!


	23. honey and gold

Two days shy of seven weeks Marty’s cast is declared fit to come off, and in exchange for the white plaster he leaves his first impromptu round of physical therapy with a velcro brace and one rubber-stopped cane that he handles with the same brand of enthusiasm as sun-ripened road kill. The surgeon’s outpatient office is kept borderline arctic but when he emerges into the afternoon his shirt is clinging to the dampness gathered between his shoulder blades, sticking hot against the small of his back.

Rust’s arm has long since been back on the mend and he walks next to Marty through the parking lot with his hands fisting and twitching at his sides, poised like he’s rearing to lunge and catch him at any given moment. (“Don’t you fucking dare get a wheelchair,” Marty had whispered, almost furiously, despite his collapsed position on a plastic chair at the end of the long hall they’d just hobbled down. “I’m gonna walk outta here on my own goddamn steam, for Christ’s fucking sake.”) Marty swears the whole way to the Cadillac in something akin to radio static, leaning heavy on the cane now with his braced knee held rigid, waving off Rust’s hands but not quite pushing him away.

“Doctor wasn’t lying about those pins,” he grounds out through his teeth as they get within sight of the car, elbow brushing against Rust’s ribs, they’re walking so damn close. “Almost feels like I got broken glass grinding around in there when I bend it right.”

Back in the car, he sits panting in the passenger seat with the air cranked on full blast and traces the pink scars on his kneecap between two fingers, peeking out through the top of the brace like rolled and flattened wads of sun-warmed bubblegum.

“Couple more for the collection,” he says, and Rust doesn’t say anything, only squints ahead into the afternoon and pulls out of the lot.  
  


* * *  
  


The evening unfolds over grilled cheese and cans of tomato soup, a round of channel surfing and wading through emails until Marty knocks back a couple baby aspirin and pushes his laptop aside, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes until he sees stars.

“Only so much of that I can take at one time,” he says, blinking hard in Rust’s direction. “Goddamn eyes are crossing.”

“Let me see that knee,” Rust says, quiet, bumping the back of his hand against Marty’s thigh.

Marty grunts and wedges himself against the arm of the couch, stiffly swinging his leg around until it’s resting heavy across Rust’s lap. The sound of velcro being undone gives way and Rust pulls the black brace off and sets it aside, rubbing his thumb around the swell of Marty’s kneecap.

The skin is red from constriction and warmth and he massages his fingers into it, listening to Marty suck in a tight wisp of a breath when the tip of his ring finger skims along the pink ridge of scar tissue.

“That hurt?” he murmurs, cutting his eyes to Marty’s face, and gets the shake of a head in response.

“Just sensitive,” Marty says on exhale, settling back against the pillows. “Feels good otherwise.”

Rust’s hands warm up as he presses into the tight muscle and tendons behind and above Marty’s knee, working his thumbs up further until he has to ruck the leg of his soft jersey shorts up and away, letting the other man go boneless in his hands until he’s practically slumped over and dozing.

The television drones on and Marty starts snoring, a soft and whispering sound, air whistling in and out between his parted lips. Rust’s hands stop their work and he pulls Marty’s shorts back down, drumming his fingers against his calf before leaning over and pressing his lips to the top of the longest scar starting above Marty’s knee, letting them linger against the raised weal of skin.

“Marty,” he says after a moment, sitting back up and waiting for the other man’s eyelids to flutter open. “C’mon, you need to get on to bed.”

“The hell I do,” Marty mumbles, watching Rust wrap the brace back around his knee before glancing at the clock. “Wasn’t even really asleep. We haven’t seen the late show yet—and did you just?”

He smiles lopsided, eyes narrowed, face tinged with a trace of warm blush. “Did you just kiss my knee?”

Rust clears his throat. He’s staring at the TV but not registering a damn thing flashing across the screen. “Dunno what you’re talking about.”

Marty sits up and scoots down the couch back to Rust, half-falling into him and pulling them both down as he goes. They end up splayed long-ways across the cushions with their legs tangled together, Marty straddling the solid line of Rust’s side.

“Such a girl,” he says, mouthing the words against the underside of Rust’s jaw, laughing soft when Rust’s hand comes up to jab him in the side.

Marty reaches down and gets his fingers up under the hem of Rust’s shirt, pushes it up until his palm is braced around the curve of his rib cage, warm skin scar-mottled and thick to the touch. He knows the tips of his first three fingers fit perfect into the rounded grooves there and the knowledge alone pulls a low groan loose, makes him slot his groin in tight against the jut of Rust’s hip until he draws up for a kiss and catches sight of the other man’s face.

“Hey,” he says, pushing himself up, gone still. “What’s wrong?”

Rust’s lids are drawn low and he pulls his eyes out of the air to meet Marty’s, blinking slow, deliberate. “Nothing,” he says, resting one hand against the small of Marty’s back. “Was just thinking.”

“Thinking about what?” Marty murmurs, pulling his hand away from Rust’s side to settle it in the junction between his neck and shoulder, thumb skimming the softened line of his jaw.

Rust’s eyes flash and Marty knows, knows right then without a word passing in the air between them.

“Jesus, Rust,” he says, sighing against Rust’s shoulder before lifting his head. He finds the pink split still shining below his eye and presses his mouth against it, just a whisper of dry lips along the ridge of a cheekbone. Rust’s body goes laxer and he turns into it, catching the corner of Marty’s mouth with his lips and opening against it, taking his bottom lip gently until their mouths meet and slot together, warm and wet and tasting.

Marty braces his fingers up around the base of Rust’s skull, parting through the soft hair there as he licks into the seam of his mouth, rutting forward slow and easy while Rust’s hand drags down his back and digs into the curve of his ass. They move in languid time, bleeding together in a pool of warm friction, sure mouths and familiar hands.

When Marty drags his mouth down to suck along the line of his neck air hitches tight in Rust’s chest, welling up and bursting forth in a gasp when Marty dips his tongue into the little hollow at the base of his throat. Rust’s half-hard and his hips buck up sharp, fingers skimming along the length of Marty’s spine as he lifts his t-shirt and exposes the smooth white of his back to the air, trying to coax the soft cotton up over his neck and shoulders.

“Shit, Rust—wait,” Marty says, wrought breathless, already half-panting next to Rust’s ear. “Not out here. We gotta—we gotta get to the bedroom.”

Rust stills underneath him, eyes and face gone dead sober. “Marty,” he says, gaze casting down through his lashes. “Your knee.”

“My knee what?”

“Don’t want you hurting it none.” The words come out of Rust’s mouth like they’re lined in tin foil, unwilling to scrape past his teeth. “If you’re too tired and sore—”

“Too tired and sore to do you?” Marty asks, drumming his fingers against Rust’s chest as he barks out a huff of a laugh. “You underestimate me, slick. I ain’t dead just yet.”

He pushes himself up into sitting with his knee hanging off the side of the couch, gets a hand on the front of Rust’s shirt and pulls him forward until their mouths slide back into place. Rust’s got one hand anchored on Marty’s hip with the other splayed warm around his stomach, and when Marty readies to stand Rust goes up with him, both of them rising together in a joint effort of muscle and bone.

“Bedroom,” Marty says again, like Rust might’ve forgotten, and they stumble around the coffee table like soldiers from the warring trench, a braided twist of arms and hands not so much keeping one another held up as much as they’re keeping one another held together.

They make it to the hallway and slide up against the wall with a soft thud, Rust’s hands fumbling at his shirt buttons before he gives up three down and yanks it over his head, leaving the blue flannel in a heap on the floor. Marty’s eyes widen at that and he pulls the hem of Rust’s wifebeater loose, fingertips skimming against the soft skin below his beltline as he works it free and lets it fall to the carpet.

Rust’s hands are hot around his hips as he pushes them further down the hall, nearly tipping over headfirst into the wall when he thumbs Marty’s shorts down over his hips and catches his heel in the leg.

Marty wedges his arm in like a buffer between Rust’s shoulder and the doorframe as they stumble into the bedroom, Rust falling over backwards until he’s splayed out across the sheets, wearing nothing but his pants with the top button already popped loose.

He yanks his zipper down and shoves them over his hips, arching up off the mattress so Marty can pull them over his thighs and legs until they’re in a pile next to the nightstand, boxer briefs following soon after to land at the foot of the bed.

The sight of Rust laying there—rock hard with his breath coming fast—clenches hot in the pit of Marty’s stomach and he tugs his own boxers down, swearing soft when they get caught along the edge of his brace. He strips them and his undershirt off and presses his good knee in the wide spread between Rust’s legs, sliding across the bed and easing down over his torso, pressing his open mouth next to Rust’s navel, along the curved ridge of his scar and above the blue sigil etched above his heart. The hard line of Rust’s dick drags over his hip and stomach as he moves north and the moment their groins slot in together Marty nearly cries in relief.

“You want it like this?” Rust rasps when Marty finally reaches him, searching his face for the answer. The yellow bedside lamp is the only light burning and it makes his irises glow warm-toned grey, sleepy-bright and earnest.

Marty nods, dragging a hand up the length of the other man’s side. “Yeah,” he says, swallowing tight when Rust’s body shudders once beneath him. “Need you like this.”

The lube is fumbled from its place in the bedside drawer as they shift together toward the headboard, Rust still on his back with his head falling against the pillows. He lets Marty get a spare one tucked up under his hips, watching closely as the other man urges him with his hands to rise up far enough to slide it into place.

“Get that other one up under your knee,” Rust says, quiet, fingers sliding down Marty’s forearm in a gentle kind of appeal, and Marty doesn’t fight him, only nods as he gets settled with a pillow cushioning his bad knee and pops the cap off the lube.

Rust breathes out harsh through his nose when Marty pushes two fingers into him, eyes fluttering beneath closed lids. His hands fist in the sheets and he tries not to push back against the wet burn of it, lets Marty work him open through the tightness until tremors begin to ripple up through his thighs.

When Marty pulls back to push a third finger up to the knuckle Rust reaches down to catch his hand, shakes his head with a fine sheen of sweat beginning to shine at his temples.

“I’m ready,” he says, voice scraped raw. “Need you, Marty.”

“Fuck, Rust,” Marty hisses, dragging the flat of his palm down the inside of Rust’s thigh before taking his own dick in hand and slicking up. His whole body shivers against his touch as he shifts forward to kneel in the spread between Rust’s legs.

“Now?” he asks, and the muscles of Rust’s stomach clench and jump in response, dick so hard it’s verging on painful.

“Right now,” he says, nothing mindless about it, and Marty swallows the words down when he bows over to reclaim Rust’s mouth with his own, braces his arms on either side and finally pushes into him.

He slides in to the hilt and Rust sucks in a sharp ream of air through his teeth but keeps his face drawn smooth, hooks an ankle around the back of Marty’s knee while his hands lock tight around his shoulders, fingers pressing white into the sun-freckled skin.

“C’mon, Marty,” he breathes out, and Marty does, begins rocking forward into him in an easy rhythm that has Rust’s eyes squeezing shut, body pressing back into the bed as he tries to temper his breathing to match. The bright burn begins to ebb away and Marty’s fingers come up to cradle the top of Rust’s skull, tangle in the sweat-damp curls there while he pants soft into the curve between his neck and shoulder.

Their pace begins to quicken and Rust’s eyes snap open when Marty pivots forward at a new angle, stoking up a blushing warmth through his pelvis. He draws his legs up and wraps them around Marty’s waist in something that borders hard on instinct, pulling him closer and deeper, groaning low when Marty reels back and rocks into him.

“Look at me,” Marty urges him, breathing run ragged but never once breaking stride. “Want to see you.” He finds Rust’s hand with his and draws it up above their heads, fingers threaded strong and tight against the sheets, and when Rust finally opens his eyes he can _see._

Marty is there above him but he’s also drenching the walls, shining in shimmering trails of coppery gold, humming streaks of brightness crisscrossing the ceiling in shades of wild honey and sunlight strained through whiskey. The room glows with the raw taste and color of him and Rust’s eyes water against the brightness, feels his throat constricting, breath betraying him when it hits the air in a half-choked sob.

He tightens his legs around Marty’s hips and bows his head against him, watching the whorls of gold dance across the darkness behind his eyelids. He holds onto him with fingers that dig in almost painful, trying to anchor himself to the time and the place and the moment and then—with a surge of something that feels, unshakably, like faith—to Marty.

“Oh fuck,” Rust rasps out, blinking as the residual flares of light begin to slide down the walls, pooling around them and coiling in the sheets. He clutches at Marty and grapples for better purchase as his body trembles and shakes, tries to draw them closer together, pull Marty into him before the color laps against his skin and swallows them down whole.

“The room’s lit up like a fuckin’ Christmas tree,” he says. “I can’t—I _need_ —”

Marty doesn’t stop and doesn’t ask, only presses his mouth to Rust’s temple and holds him tight as they move together, murmuring soft against the warmth of sweat-damp skin. “I got you, baby,” he says, dragging his lips down to kiss the spot below Rust’s eye, the corner of his mouth, breathing the words into him like a prayer. “Got you right here with me.”

The lights dim and begin to recede into the ether like they always do, gold trails washing out and fading with the rising tide, but Rust doesn’t pay them any mind now. All he sees is Marty.

He’s gone half-soft but a familiar heat is pooling in the pit of his stomach, flaring balmy pink that deepens into syrupy rose with each jolt of pleasure that rocks through his pelvis and up the column of his spine. His hands would carve canyons in Marty’s back if anything more than flesh and bone, fingers dragging over ridges and tracing muscle in the mindless kind of voyage he could follow blind in the dark.

Marty’s thrusts have spun loose and ragged, threaded out into something more primal, but he’s not too far gone that he doesn’t lean forward to mouth against the tiny little sounds hitching fast in the back of Rust’s throat, press their foreheads together for a brief moment as he tries to catch his breath.

“Gettin’ close,” Rust whispers, working his bottom lip raw between his teeth, and one of his hands moves to reach down between them before Marty catches it in his own and pushes it back above their heads, binding Rust’s wrists together with the wide spread of his hand and pinning them there against the mattress.

“That’s for me,” he rasps, and Rust has to bite off a moan when the calloused warmth of Marty’s hand wraps around the length of him, thumb brushing soft over the head and sending a bolt of electricity snapping across his senses. He arches up into it like a drawn bow, spine curving up off the bed in tandem with the first pull of an upstroke.

Marty fucks into Rust erratic and sloppy but jerks him good, feels tension coiling up in the other man like a spring, vibrating steady in the thrumming heat gathered between them. Rust’s legs are shaking, muscles twitching and jumping on their own accord, and if he could manage words now there’s a good chance they’d be something far-flung and archaic, a voice ripped up by the roots from the earth.

One last thrust hits Rust’s sweet spot and it’s over, all over, coming down in a gold-edged whiteout, and he might be dying or that might be the void roaring in his ears but he’s arcing up off the bed like a live wire, hands still pinned fast above him, coming so hard he could double over between them as he slicks hot over his stomach and in thick ropes over Marty’s hand.

“Oh fuck, Marty, _fuck,_ ” he hisses as the aftershocks ripple through him in waves, trying to keep his thighs wrapped tight around Marty’s hips. Another handful of fitful thrusts has Marty lighting up and tipping over the edge behind him, bracing himself above and around Rust, fingers slackening around his wrists and sliding down over his forearms as a familiar name rolls fast off his tongue. He bucks lazy as he rides out the flash fire and blinks through the spots of color bursting behind his eyes.

Rust’s legs drop back down into the bed and Marty lets himself fall slack against him, face wedged in the crook above Rust’s shoulder, bodies pressed together in a long line of sweat-slicked skin. They lay there panting hard, Rust’s eyes dipping shut as he traces soothing lines and circles across Marty’s shoulders with the pads of his fingers.

“You alright?” Rust breathes out eventually, hands still drawing up lines of gooseflesh on Marty’s back. He earns a muffled grunt in response and feels Marty begin to move on top of him, a warm wind across his shifting sands.

“Still in one piece,” Marty says, pushing himself up and running a hand down Rust’s side as he slowly pulls out and away, making a face at the mess glistening across their torsos in the weak light.

He flops down next to Rust all the same, fishing his undershirt from the floor to gently wipe it over Rust’s stomach before flipping to a clean corner and doing the same for himself. They’re both still shining with cooling sweat but he draws Rust to him anyways, knots their legs up and wraps a hand around the curve of his side. His mouth and nose are pressed along the warmth of Rust’s neck, lips curving up against the pulse jumping steady there.

“Guess I’d been needing that,” he murmurs, and the line of Rust’s throat works as he swallows, tendons shifting easy and slight.

“Guess so,” he says, twisting around in Marty’s arms to get a hand around the back of his neck, pressing a kiss to his mouth, warm and sweet enough that it makes Marty’s throat ache.

Rust’s lips keep moving over Marty’s mouth and neck, forming words that don’t vibrate with sound or take to the air, but if Marty followed the shape of the vowels and the sum of syllables he might recognize three words being spoken soft against his skin.  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all must've known this would be coming for quite some time, so if it caught you on unawares I don't know what to tell you. This is the "Rust and Marty Are In Love" show. Sorry, I have no shame left.
> 
> Also: this update is being put up not even a week after the last one, so I wanted to be sure you guys had a chance to read Chapter 22. Thinking this one might make a little more sense if you're up to speed with what happened in the last installment.
> 
> I have a tentative plan for the remainder of this fic that puts me at about 10/11 more chapters of varying sizes. I'll be dealing with some more bizarre themes of my own monstrous creation, of course, but I'm also looking forward to addressing established canon issues and some of the good ol' tropes you all know and love. Sick!fic, anybody?
> 
> Until next time!


	24. spare bedroom

Green tea and daily multivitamins aside, it takes one busted knee and a pressing ultimatum from the doctor before Marty goes hell-bent on dropping those last ten pounds he’s been carrying around on surplus for the past decade. One for each year, he privately figures—and it’s funny, maybe, how the voice in his head kinda sounds like Rust when he thinks it.

“Thinking I’m ready to clean up and out,” he announces when they walk in from PT on a Thursday afternoon, leaving his cane against the wall as he chugs a glass of ice water. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and blows out a refreshed kind of sound, clinking the glass back down on the counter with a ring of finality. “Time’s come. Fixing to embark on a change.”

“Huh,” Rust grunts from the recliner where he’s bent over untying his boots, letting the cat rub up against his arm while he pulls the laces. “We talking you cutting back on peanut butter cookies or some kind of spiritual awakening?”

“I’m not getting any younger,” Marty says, limping back into the living room. “Suppose I should take better care of what I’ve got while it’s still worth keeping up, figure out what I need to hold onto.”

Rust settles back into the recliner as Marty passes on his way to the sofa, holding his palm open as Ghost springs up on the armrest to butt her head into it. He watches Marty and his face looks the way it once did nearly twenty years gone, whittled from wood and inlaid with polished marble, though the all-seeing eyes are softer these days, fine lined and easy, more sun-bleached silk cornflower than arctic ice on the regular.

Then the corner of Rust’s mouth pulls into something like a smile and the old spell is broken, a pebble dropped through the surface of a reflecting pool. “Not like you to start waxing cryptic,” he drawls, blinking slow. “What is it you’ve got your mind set on all a sudden?”

Marty leans forward to palm the television remote off the coffee table, idly paring through channels. “Nothing highfalutin,” he says, not turning despite the weight of Rust’s eyes hanging heavy on him. “Like I said, just cleaning up and out.”

 

* * *  
  


The spare bedroom is the first thing to feel the wrath of newfound determination.

Marty’s lived in the house running nigh on ten years, knows he moved in somewhere around the spring of ’05 after letting the lease on his one-bedroom condo run out. There’d once been a time when he danced with delusions of having the girls over and entertaining some pretty little gal’s friends at barbecues, of porch swings with flowered cushions and pitchers of homemade lemonade, maybe some kind of wine tasting thing if he ever saw fit. However it was, whatever it was that people liked to do—though hell if shit ever really does turn out the way you first planned it.

And so he moved in and any clutter that came with him set up shop in the spare room, suspended in what he told himself was the brief purgatory between House and Home. Not much to speak of at first—dog-eared books and old files, riding trophies, fishing gear not yet relegated to the garage, whatever else he’d packed up and hadn’t looked at inside the long end of decade. The sprawl had gradually been added to as the years ticked past, like a cake he kept coming back to ice on itching compulsion, occasionally adding a fresh layer of decoration until the original vision was hidden under a veneer of too many years and too many fumbled intentions.

Walk in and you’ll find a rotating floor fan he bought in the summer of ’07 when the air conditioner went out for three days, hasn’t used it since. His grandmother’s old Singer sewing machine table—which could fetch a pretty fair price at auction these days, Marty tells himself—, though he hasn’t quite gotten around to getting it appraised just yet. A collection of fishing lures spread out on top of the aforementioned table and a Mancala set, still wrapped in plastic. Books, files, boxes galore, a bowling ball he hasn’t touched in fifteen years and the monogrammed throw blanket his parents had given him and Maggie on their wedding day, still in the original box with a white satin ribbon gone yellow with age.

Here and now, a good handful of years later, the room still sits stagnant, and things sure as hell didn’t turn out the way Marty first planned them.

At the tail end of that second week after he half-carried Rust through the front door—a time his mind has vaguely come to know as AC, whether that means After Carcosa or After Cohle, could be one in the same—, they swung by the little ho-hum deal behind that country bar and packed Rustin Cohle’s worldly possessions into seven cardboard boxes and a large duffel. Most of them were the books not locked up in that crime scene of a storage unit, and Marty knows this because he had to swat Rust’s hands away and insist on carrying them out to the truck himself. (“If you rip a stitch loose trying to show your ass, Rust, so help me God—just go fold up those three ugly shirts you have hanging up, I got the goddamn books.”)

There’d been one other box, though—an eighth. It was the size of shoebox, maybe a hair or two bigger, and hadn’t needed to be packed because it already was. The corners were dented in, softened and ragtag like it’d seen more moves than just this one, though there was nothing scrawled on the outside in black ink, no scuffed wounds left by pulled scotch tape. Marty tried to pick it up and Rust was still in a pretty bad way but he’d moved like a switchblade, not deterring Marty with any sort of vocal rebuke but with a vibrating surge of that old razor-edged intensity that had him falling back on his heels.

“I got this one,” he’d said, and he had, stooping to lift the box despite the sutures holding him together, face fit to belie any pain on the way back up. And even if it had weighed a thousand goddamn pounds Rust would have still carried it out to the truck, letting it rend him in half the whole way there, a martyr bearing the cross to his own fucking crucifixion.

Marty watched him go, peering through the shade-less window as Rust tucked it into the cab behind the driver’s seat—not in the bed with the other boxes, no, not one of those. He folded up the three shirts himself and stuffed them into the duffel bag before bending to pull the rumpled sheet off the mattress sitting on the living room floor, an act that wasn’t necessary but one he felt compelled to carry out all the same.

Later that night the first seven boxes had come to land somewhere in the spare room, and Marty knows this too because he carried them there himself. There’d been something about it, the notion of mixing Rust’s neatly-boxed clutter with his own, keeping it all behind a closed door in an otherwise tidy and idle house—but he hadn’t examined that too closely, at least not just yet.

The next time Marty thinks of the eighth box is the following week when he’s got the bench seat pushed forward in the truck, trying to find whatever it is down there that keeps rattling around in the sideboard when they take a turn. The only reason he remembers it is because it’s no longer there, and he’ll be damned if he can evoke a memory of Rust bringing it inside at any point, dragging another one of his ghosts over the threshold, one more thing to keep them both up at night.

He finds an empty bullet casing lodged under the passenger seat along with a fat paper-clipped stack of unpaid parking citations dating clear back to 2002 and promptly forgets about the box for more than a year.

The evening he turns up the old kitchen radio and hobbles into the spare room with some sense of purpose, he finds it within ten minutes.  
  


* * *  
  


Rust has been out of the house for a few good hours, gone on the pretense of getting some work done at the office and fucking off doing whatever it is Rust Cohle does in his spare time alone, something Marty once contemplated as if it were whatever was there before the universe fell slap-dash out of god’s hands into being. Rust had run his fingers across Marty’s shoulders on his way out the door and mumbled something about being back around dinnertime, giving them both ample enough time for Marty to finish cleaning out the office filing cabinets before he came home to roost.

Five minutes to six, Marty’s blowing dust off the old atlas he used to keep in the car and setting it aside, reaching for the unopened Mancala set when he sees the squat box. It’s foreign upon closer inspection but nestled inconspicuous between two other nondescript boxes, full of old high school yearbooks and rodeo titles.

He stares at it for a solid fifteen seconds without moving, caught up in a flutter of vague snapshot memories. The top is folded shut, not taped or sealed, and he sits down in the small space cleared on the carpet to stretch his knee out before deciding he never was much good with impulse control.

Don McLean croons down the hall from the kitchen, drowning out the familiar sound of a truck engine as it momentarily idles and cuts out in the driveway.  
  


* * *  
  
  


Rust knows he is standing in the doorway of the spare room.

He remembers how he got here, the movements neat and distinctly vivid: front door unlocked, shut and relocked behind him, mail and keys on the kitchen counter, boots off by the recliner, the hallway carpet stretching soft under his feet. He knows that if Marty were to open his mouth at this moment he wouldn’t be able to hear him, blood pounding out a nauseating war-drum beat in his ears, behind his eyes, against the rigid tension clenching hot in his throat.

“I said,” he repeats—doesn’t know if the words even managed to strike air the first time, roaring a lurid, arterial crimson in his head—, “what the fuck are you doing?”

Marty is sitting in the middle of the spare room with the open box next to him. His lips are parted, revealing the tip of his tongue where it presses into the point of his right canine tooth. He glances down at the small object in the palm of his hand like he himself might have forgotten in the meantime and then looks back up at Rust, mouth pressed into a thin line.

“Rust,” he starts in, and immediately sets the thing in his hand down, reverent, gentle, like he’s afraid it might break. “Listen, I—”

Rust’s voice cuts back through the air a few octaves louder than before, dangerously steady, words die-cut without any of their usual whistling drawl. “Who the fuck said you could touch that?”

Marty feels his jaw square up, adrenals already burning hot in his gut. “Considering it’s in my goddamn house,” he says, “who the fuck do you think I needed to ask?”

Before the last syllable even leaves his mouth, he knows with a marrow-deep certainty that he is going to regret it.

Rust stands like an iron statue in the doorway with his fingers digging bone-white into the meat of his palms.

“That isn’t for you,” he says. “That will never be for you. You wouldn’t know the first fucking thing about it or what I’ve been through, Marty, what it could ever fucking mean.”

“I guess not,” Marty snaps, “seeing as how I held your fucking head up while you bled out under my own two hands, brought you here to stay with me when you were still completely fucked out of your mind, screaming and thrashing around all night long. Fucking bent over backwards for you, Rust, which is more than I could say for any other person on the face of the fucking earth, and you’re still too stubborn and fucked up on your own deluded brand of self-pity after all I’ve done to give me the common decency—”

“Go ahead, Marty,” Rust cuts in over him. “Go right on ahead and be the goddamn hero, just like you always are. You want me to pat you on the fucking back? Give you a commendation for taking on the raging fuckup as a fixer-upper—am I rehabilitated enough for you yet, do you think? Or am I still a work in progress?”

Marty’s face twists up pinched and sour. “Rust, that’s not—”

“And if you think for one second,” Rust hisses around his teeth, “that fucking me in the ass gives you the right to _anything_ then you’re a fucking fool. A bigger goddamn moron than I remotely thought possible.”

Marty blinks once, twice, and laughs ugly in his throat until the sound crumples like tissue paper there. “Is that all we’re doing here, Rust?” he asks, shaking his head. “Just fucking one another? This whole time. Just fucking—that’s it?”

He can’t remember a time when Rust wouldn’t look him in the eye, not even at that far-flung end they scraped raw on the concrete, busted out through a shattered tail light.

“That doesn’t matter,” Rust says, throat working fast. “You still have no right, wouldn’t have any fucking clue—”

“I wouldn’t?” Marty levels back from the floor. “When my own daughters spent ten years trying to forget who I was? Hating—no—Christ, that ain’t even the right word. Fucking indifferent, Rust, _apathetic_ , like all that ain’t any kind of loss at all? Not worth a single damn because you’re the only one who feels pain, right? Everybody else is just living under one big fuckup of an illusion?”

Only later it will occur to Rust that he was screaming.

“How could you ever know what true loss feels like when you fucking pushed your own children away from you?” he shouts. “I never had the choice, never had the chance to pick what I lost—and what’s two fucking years compared to ten? Five fucking lifetimes for my daughter, who’s never coming back no matter how much I change, no matter what I do, because there’s nothing left to fix when she’s dead and buried in the fucking ground.”

Marty’s mouth has been moving but Rust couldn’t hear, couldn’t discern the softness of it through the whining roar in his ears, and it takes him a moment to read the words falling like prayer from the other man’s lips, another for his own voice to cut out hoarse and sudden, clamping off tight in his aching throat long enough to listen.

“I’m sorry,” Marty says, just above a whisper, eyes drained dull and exhausted. “So goddamn sorry, Rust.”

Rust’s pulse is jackhammering frantic below his ear but he doesn’t reach up to press two fingers against it, couldn’t if he tried. The world is spiraling down the long neck of a funnel and he feels his knees start to weaken, tremble and slacken under the weight of it all, under the weight of everything.

He stumbles forward into the room like he’s moving through water and hits the carpet, knees and hands and one hip hard enough to bruise, reaches out half-blind until he’s got his forehead pressed to the front of Marty’s shoulder, hand fisted weak at his back. His breath comes in ragged bursts and he closes his eyes, trying to measure it out even as it dampens the fabric of Marty’s shirt.

Marty doesn’t move for a long time, for what seems like an eternity, and then his hand is coming up to rest around the back of Rust’s neck, solid and warm and heavy, a quiet reprieve.

“Shouldn’t have done it,” he says, letting the words drop soft into Rust’s hair. “You were right, I should’ve known better. It’s not for me.”

“Marty,” Rust says, and he moves like he’s dying, drawing up the bodily weight of a thousand different burdens as he raises his head. Marty turns into him without a thought and then Rust’s lips are against the corner of his mouth, the swell of his bottom lip, resting there like a promise, soft and gently yielding.

“What I said before,” he murmurs, holding their faces close, breathing easier now. “That’s not all we’re doing. I didn’t—I didn’t mean it.”

“I know you didn’t,” Marty says, clearing his throat. “I know.”

Rust maneuvers around slow and stiff until he’s sitting straight in the midst of the boxes, thigh pressed up close to Marty’s, their shoulders still knocking together. “Funny how you remember what’s important, what you really need,” he says, staring hard at the carpet and thumbing under his eye. “Right in the middle of trying to shove it away.”

“Takes a little more than that to get rid of me,” Marty says, trying on a water-thinned kind of smile. “Gonna have to try harder.”

Rust wordlessly reaches across Marty’s lap to pick up what he’d set down earlier. A single toddler’s shoe, made up of faded blue canvas, embroidered with tiny white and yellow flowers. The sole is only about as long as the length of his palm and he sets it down to tie the white laces back up, looping and pulling the bow through with care.

“Her favorite pair,” he says, and pulls the cardboard box around to settle between them, the _shushing_ sound on the carpet making Marty loosely shiver. “I never could find the other one, after.”

Marty bites down on the inside of his cheek hard enough that it smarts. “You don’t have to tell me,” he says, bringing his hand up to ghost over Rust’s back, thumb following the ridge of his spine. “Not if you don’t want.”

“You deserve to know about her, Marty,” Rust says, pitched low, leaning into the other man like a crutch. “If anybody does, it’s you.”

He sets the tiny shoe aside and reaches into the box, pulling out a standard white envelope gone yellow around the corners with age. “Didn’t keep much,” he murmurs, letting a set of mismatched photographs slide out into his hand. “Composites of the moment tend to make the genuine memory unravel faster. Felt like the more I kept, the less I’d really remember.”

Marty watches Rust flip through the few photos like he’s seeing them for the first time, eyes flicking over images of a little girl with a headful of honey-brown curls, alone and then not, pictured in one photo sitting on a caramel-complexioned woman’s lap as she stares wide-eyed at a birthday cake topped with Winnie the Pooh figurines, next to a younger and softer Rust in another, wearing a ruffled violet bathing suit and caught grinning as she holds out a melting ice cream cone for him to bite into.

And Marty’s never really thought about Rust the Young Father, never been able to visualize it without peering through a plane of frosted glass, but he sees him now, plain as day, with his eyebrows high on his forehead as he leans in to take an exaggerated bite out of his baby’s strawberry ice cream like it’ll be the best goddamn thing he’s ever tasted, sun-melted pink mixed with toddler spit and all. Marty knows this picture because he’s already seen it, felt it, lived it, twenty-something years before while Audrey giggled and squealed _no Daddy, that’s a big lick!_

Rust pulls a different photo to the front of the stack, one where the little girl is sitting with a string of too-long costume pearls around her neck, one tiny foot jammed down into the toe of a woman’s high heel. She contemplates the camera with a serious kind of expression while an old house phone is pressed akimbo to the side of her head, long cord severed to make it mobile. Her skin is a few shades darker than Rust’s but those eyes are his, all his, an unmistakably familiar shade of bright blue.

“Sophia,” Rust says, and Marty immediately steals the moment away, tries to remember the shape of the vowels and consonants on Rust’s tongue.  “I picked it the week we found out. Means _wisdom_.”

He thumbs the edge of the photograph and then hands it to Marty, taking a moment to look at one of Sophia bent over into a basket full of Easter eggs—buttoned up into a white and blue dress bunched up around her knees—before revealing the last one in the stack, hidden until now.

Marty’s throat tightens as soon as he sees it, has to blink through the bright burn as he listens to the soft drawl of Rust’s voice.

“She wouldn’t sleep through the night when we first brought her home, always fussing, wouldn’t nurse,” he says. “Could never stand listening to her cry, even when she’d get into trouble later on. So I’d sit and rock with her for the first couple weeks.”

Rust sighs, the sound barely hitching around the edges. “Claire always put on like she was annoyed, that she’d only ever quiet down with me during the night, but then I found this.”

He holds the photo out and Marty takes it, letting it rest flat on his palm, afraid to smudge the corners of the memory. Rust, stripped down to his shorts, propped up in a nursery glider with the baby tucked up high on his chest. Both of them are fast asleep with their features dark under the shadow of rising daylight, draped over in a thin swaddling blanket.

“She was a good baby later—happy,” Rust says, letting Marty pass the handful of photos back before he slides them into the old envelope. “It was just those first couple weeks that were rough. Laugh sounded just like Claire’s as she got older, and she had the attitude to match, man.”

He smiles, just a barest ghost of a grin, eyes gone a shade or two brighter. “Don’t know what it was, but she loved dinosaurs, had a whole herd of plastic ones I was always trying not to step on. Never about the baby dolls so much, used to carry around a stuffed dinosaur in particular—Rexy, she called him.”

Marty clears his throat, thumb rubbing idle circles over Rust’s hip now. “What’d she call you?” he asks, quiet.

“Daddy,” Rust says, easy enough, and Marty tries to remember if he’s ever heard Rust say the word before until Rust laughs, low and sudden. “Then she’d cut up and call me Rust sometimes, probably because she heard Claire yelling it through the house every time I got a call from the station. You should have heard her on Christmas, not minding me, yellin’ it while she sped down to the end of the driveway on her new—”

He stops short, face drained down to something ashen, and makes a point of looking out the open door into the hallway. Marty sits with him, still and silent, as Rust’s hand comes up to his mouth for a moment before dropping away again. He doesn’t shake this time, not like the times before, but swipes his fingers at the corners of his eyes, coughing slight.

“Well,” he says, after a little while, voice hammered out thin. “There you have it.”

“Thank you,” Marty says, and Rust nods once, eyes on Marty’s hands.

He lets Marty take the envelope and the shoe and put them back into the box, careful to not crush the few small things left in there, things he’ll wait to hear about on another day.

“Help my crippled ass up off this floor,” Marty says, gently clapping his hand against the inside of Rust’s knee.  “I’m taking us both to bed early.”

Rust wordlessly goes about pushing himself up, standing there in one of his linen shirts, rumpled and creased where it’d bunched up around his thighs as he sat. His eyes are cast over glassy, lines of his body held taut but slowly unraveling under the heavy pull of exhaustion.

“Maybe we can even make tender love like in one of those sappy movies I catch you watching,” Marty teases, tongue caught between his teeth, and Rust’s face breaks enough to cut him a dry look as he extends a hand and hoists Marty to his feet.

“Five minutes while I’m flipping through case files hardly counts as watching that shit, Marty," Rust says, ignoring the first part even though he knows he wouldn't turn down a night wrapped up in the other man's arms. "Least I don’t sit and bawl through that cartoon about the robot.”

He sniffs once and makes to drop Marty’s hand but Marty holds it tight, pulling him back in close.

“He loved Hogarth, you asshole,” he says, and presses his smiling mouth to Rust’s, gently catching his upper lip. “I love you too, you know that?”

“Never have told another soul about any of that,” Rust says, bringing his hand up to run down Marty’s side, settling on the curve of his hip. “Not a one. About my—about Sophia, you know. So you gotta know that I—that I do too, Marty.” He blows out a rattling kind of sigh. “Christ, you’re just something else.”

Marty laughs softly before steering them both toward the hall, clumsily sidestepping the litter of boxes and an empty trash bag as he goes.

“You’re gonna be saying that last part again here in about fifteen minutes,” he says, not bothering to pull the door shut behind them.  
  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOW LONG HAVE WE BEEN WAITING FOR A FIGHT? And for me to finally address Sophia for more than two seconds? Holy shit, what a struggle. But here it is.
> 
> Some of you might also recognize a moment from my short fic "perennials" mixed up in there with the photographs. I suppose I am connecting separate pieces and time frames now, I do not rightly know, but I liked the image enough to repeat it here.


	25. dulcet

The land line rings just as Marty starts lathering shampoo into his hair, chiming in faint over the beat of hot water falling steady between his feet.

“Would you get that, Rust?” he says, spitting through water, not bothering to pull back the shower curtain and squint at the other man standing in front of the sink. “It’s either a telemarketer or family, gonna have to take the gamble.”

Rust’s hand stalls out midair, razor still poised above his upper lip. Half his lower face is still soapy with foam but he sets the blade down and walks without hurry through the open bathroom door, nearly to the kitchen by the top of the fourth ring.

“This is Cohle,” he says on pickup, an unshakeable reflex, holding the receiver to the clean-shaven side of his face. He presses the tip of a finger into the white lather on the other side, rubbing it into the heart of his palm until the cream melts and vanishes.

“Hey,” he says softly, canting a hip against the counter. “How’ve you been?—fine, can’t complain. In the shower. Yeah, the knee’s getting better. He’s still on the cane but it takes time, you know. Maybe after Christmas.”

Ghost hops up onto the stool behind the bar and trills once, back arching under Rust’s fingers as they follow the delicate ridge of her spine. “We could do that,” he says after a moment, scratching behind the cat’s ears. “He’s opened the pictures you sent probably twenty times in the past two days. He wouldn’t say no.”

“We’ll be here,” he says, listening to Marty croon and blurt out an off-tune verse from some pop country song. “Nope, weekend’s wide open. I’ll tell him. Alright then—mmm, bye.”

Back in the bathroom Rust wets his razor and resumes shaving, periodically rinsing the blade under the drizzling faucet, lost back in the mindless sort of ritual while his thoughts dip and loiter elsewhere.

“Who was that?” Marty asks, peeking from around the shower curtain with suds still sliding down his shoulder. After all this time he still holds it in front of his crotch like he’s got something to hide, watching as Rust tips his chin up to shave the line of his throat in the mirror.

“Audrey,” Rust says, standing there in nothing but scars and a pair of sweatpants slung low over the bony jut of his hips. “She and Orren have got a gallery showing across the Texas line, were planning on driving through on their way down in the morning. Wanted to know if we could watch the baby ‘til Sunday evening.”

“Watch the—watch the baby? Overnight?”

“Yeah.”

Marty blinks but doesn’t drop the shower curtain. “Good Lord, what’d you tell her?”

“Told them to come on,” Rust says, wiping and patting around his jaw with a damp cloth. He hangs it over the towel rack and hitches one thigh up one the edge of the vanity, lines of his body bowed in concave. “You got plans I don’t know about?”

“No,” Marty says, and disappears back under the spray of the water. “I’m just—surprised, is all.”

The seam between Rust’s eyebrows pinches, one thread pulled tight. “What makes you say that?”

“Audrey ain’t ever exactly had me pegged for Dad of the Year, and since when are you of all people voluntarily picking up babysittin’ jobs on the side?”

It takes a moment for the words to boomerang back around in an echo, and when they do Marty watches suds disappear down the drain as he shakes his head, cursing harsh and silent behind the curtain.

“Maybe people can change, Marty,” Rust says, just barely loud enough to cut over the running water. “Would’ve thought we’d both have that figured out by now.”

Marty slaps the faucet off and yanks the curtain back, but Rust is already gone before he can manage to fumble out an apology.  
  


* * *  
  


“Did you put curtains up since the last time I was here?” Audrey asks, stepping through the front door to drop the diaper bag off her shoulder. Orren comes in behind her with the car seat hooked over his arm, a light blanket draped over its front to hide the sleeping occupant inside.

“They’ve been here since the week I moved into this place,” Marty says, shutting the door shut against the wet chill seeping in behind them. “Why’s everybody got a problem with my damn curtains?”

“They look nice, Dad,” Audrey says, laughing soft, and pushes up on the toes of her boots to wrap an arm around his neck. “Rust said you really liked the pictures I sent of Lilah’s Halloween costume.”

“Oh he did, did he?” Marty asks, watching Orren set the car seat down next to the coffee table before cutting his eyes over to Rust. “He tell you about how he took the one I printed off and hung it on the fridge all by himself?”

Rust stands propped up against the counter with his ankles crossed, steeped down in sleepy-eyed ease. “I imagine that’s where it was headed anyhow,” he says, pushing off to let Audrey briefly lean into his side, one hand spanning broad across her back. “Just beat you to it, is all.”

“Yeah, I bet,” Marty snorts, turning to stand in front of the covered car seat. “Where’s the guest of honor?” he asks. “Y’all hiding this beautiful baby to keep other parents from getting jealous or what?”

Orren squats down and folds the blanket back to reveal the tiny face inside, fast asleep. “She slept most of the way over, so she’ll probably be rearing to go once she’s up,” he says quietly, unbuckling the straps and getting a hand up around Lilah’s head as he lifts her out. Audrey steps up and they go through a wordless kind of exchange with practiced ease, one set of hands supporting where the others fall away.

“She’s still a little small for four months but we’re making progress,” Audrey says, pressing a kiss to the top of the baby’s head. “Eats like a racehorse, so I packed a whole container of formula in your crash kit.”

Rust blinks a couple times, standing slightly bent forward with his hands anchored against his thighs. “Do—do you need me to help bring anything inside?” he asks, swallowing, looking at nothing in particular. “From the car.”

  
  
  
  
  
Two trips to the trunk and back leave a small arsenal of baby supplies piled in the floor and spread out on the kitchen counter. Collapsible bassinet, a pack of diapers, two extra blankets; a couple outfits and a set of footie pajamas, wet wipes and baby lotion, the near-bursting diaper bag, one tiny knit hat. The empty car seat sits in the corner, undergoing wary inspection by a certain cat, stretched out long and tense to sniff around the fabric.

“You’re gonna be good for grandpa and poppy, hmm?” Audrey says, bouncing slightly as she walks across the carpet. Lilah blinks awake at Rust from over her mother’s shoulder, already busy rooting around against the fabric of her sweater. Orren says something from the doorway and Audrey turns back around, eyebrows raised. “Do you want us to leave the stroller, Dad?”

“You can leave it,” Marty says, grinning at Rust with his tongue caught between his teeth. “Me and _Poppy_ here might get a wild hair and take the grandbaby on a scenic nature walk to get some fresh air, maybe loosen up the knee a little.”

Audrey hands the baby off to Marty, lips turned up into a smile, though her face is awash with something that makes her look caught mid-breath. “Well,” she says, leaning into Orren when he wraps an arm around her waist. “I guess you’ve got everything you need.”

“Your dad’s been through two pretty successful test runs, babe,” Orren says, catching Marty’s eye over her head. “He’s got this down.”

As if on cue, Lilah lets out one pealing cry like the first wail of a siren and then promptly dissolves into a red-faced squalling fit.

“Aww, sweetheart,” Marty murmurs, bouncing in place and rubbing his hand up and down her back while she screams. “Shhh, no, you’re alright—don’t cry now, you just got here.”

That shrill, primal sound vibrates through the house and down into their bones and just when Audrey goes to step forward, Rust is beside Marty with his hands held out, reaching to take her.

“Hand her here for a second,” he says, quiet, watching Marty blink a little dumbly before he shifts around to place the baby in Rust’s hands. “Wanna try something.”

Lilah keeps crying as Rust gently turns her over, laying her face-down so she’s straddling his right arm stretched out on her stomach. He keeps arm and baby tucked close against his stomach and runs his free hand over her back, lazily swaying in place, and within a handful of seconds her fussing quiets down into a soft whimper until it fades altogether.

“I’ll be,” Marty says, watching Rust’s thumb trace idle across her shoulders and down the curve of her spine. “You pull that outta your bottomless barrel of tricks just to make me look bad?”

“Nope,” Rust says, watching Lilah under the weight of his lashes. “Just something I remember working.”

Audrey looks deflated somewhat, hanging slack onto the crook of Orren’s elbow even though her eyes have brightened up some from before. “Jesus, Rust,” she says, laughing a little. “That’s gotta be a new record.”

“Have you done this before?” Orren asks, shaking his head. “You’re a natural, man.”

Marty sucks in a loaded breath but Rust only nods, moving to ease down onto the couch with the baby.

“Yeah,” he says, staying balanced on the edge of the cushion. “A long time ago now.”  
  


* * *  
  


Even after Audrey and Orren bid farewell and slip back out into the cool morning, Rust holds her there like that, hand smoothing tirelessly over her back until she starts fussing again. By that time Marty’s managed to mix and warm up a bottle, testing the formula against the back of his hand as he hobbles back from the kitchen.

“I can at least do this,” he says, sinking down next to Rust and shifting around until Lilah’s settled in the crook of his own arm. He gives the bottle one last shake and gets her to latch on in between whines. “Bottoms up, missy.”

Rust is all but pressed up against his side, eyes cut low to watch her eat.

“Is this weird?” Marty asks while the TV buzzes low, looking down at the baby and the emptying bottle in his hand. “Feels kinda weird.”

“What’s weird about it?” Rust asks, leaning forward to palm a case file off the coffee table before settling back in to flip through it. “You’re feeding the baby.”

“I don’t mean like that,” Marty says, sniffing and staring at the television. “Mean like the two of us sitting here. Together—like we are, y’know. While I’m feeding the baby.”

He chances a look at Rust, then—profile backlit by the midmorning sun slanting in through the window—, and clears his throat, eyes wavering. “Our grandbaby, I guess.”

“I dunno, Marty,” Rust says, not looking up from the file. “Starting to feel pretty natural to me.”

Marty tries not to smile too hard when he leans over real careful to keep from jarring the baby and kisses him.  
  
  
  
  


“How many times a day does this kid gotta eat?” Marty mumbles later in the afternoon, trying to measure out formula at the kitchen counter. His reading glasses are somewhere other than his face and he squints at the tiny numbers printed on the plastic scoop, holding it up to the light. “I forget you can’t just leave food out in a bowl and they help themselves.”

Rust is holding Lilah sitting up in his lap, watching as Ghost leans in to sniff her from where she’s perched on the armrest. She rests a tentative paw on Rust’s knee to come in a little closer, whiskers twitching while she touches her nose to the baby’s sock.

“Be easy,” Rust murmurs, and Ghost pulls back to sit like a sphinx with her tail wrapped around her feet, green and gold eyes decidedly uninterested.

“I’ll tell you what,” Marty says, slinging a jug of distilled water across the counter. “I think there’s some kinda conspiracy afoot, they make this goddamn print smaller every—oh shit— _fuck_ , for Christ’s—!”

There’s a clatter and a bang and when Rust glances up the front of Marty’s shirt looks like it’s been powder bombed, dusted over with a yellowish coating of baby formula. The empty container rolls across the tile and comes to a stop against the fridge while Marty swears low with his hands braced flat against the counter, head hanging in defeat.

“Well, there it went,” he says. “I just dumped the whole fucking thing.”

“You manage to get any in the bottle?” Rust asks, standing to walk over behind the counter with the baby hooked in one arm against his side. He takes a cursory look at the mess in the floor and then back up at Marty. “If we shook your shirt out, probably have enough for about three more feedings.”

“Shut up,” Marty mumbles, slapping a hand against his stomach amidst a cloud of formula. “Gonna have to go out to the store and buy a new can. Suppose we could stand to pick up a couple more things.”

“Change your shirt and go on ahead,” Rust says, pulling a broom from the space between the wall and refrigerator. “I can hold it down here for a while unless you want me to go instead.”

Marty blows out a sigh and takes the broom to start sweeping around the kitchen floor. “Guess I can run out there,” he says, and then stops, peering over Rust’s shoulder until his eyes land somewhere near the front door.

“Let’s get her bundled up and strapped into the car seat,” he says, leaning over to make a face at Lilah and getting a gummy smile in response while she kicks her feet. “We’re all fixing to take a ride.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“This is fuckin’ absurd.”

Rust is standing with his hands hitched up on his hips in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, watching Marty buckle Lilah into the stroller as the wind cards cold fingers through his hair. He’s worrying the corner of his bottom lip between his teeth, and Marty hasn’t seen hide nor hair of a cigarette carton in about a week but the look on Rust’s face warns he’s got half the mind to walk somewhere right quick and find one.

“Don’t cuss in front of the baby,” Marty says with a crooked grin, pulling his cane out of the trunk before slamming it shut. He wheels the stroller around and drums his fingers on the handlebar before taking a step back. “She’s all yours, captain.”

“You’re gonna owe me one. Something big, Marty—I’m gonna have to think about it.”

“As long as we mutually benefit, I can agree to that,” Marty says, and barks out a laugh at the withering look he gets in return. “What do you want me to do, Rust?” he asks. “I can’t push this goddamn thing and carry my cane and the basket all at the same time. It ain’t no big deal. You don’t normally care about this shit anyhow.”

Rust doesn’t respond, only wraps his hands around the handlebar and starts for the front of the store at a good clip. Lilah is blubbering and cooing up at him in her tiny hat, and he reaches down one-handed to tuck the blanket around her a little more snugly.

“Straight to the wine and spirits,” he tells her, squinting against the wind. “We gotta corrupt you early.”

“Don’t make me come up there and whip you,” Marty says from a few paces behind, knocking his cane light against the back of Rust’s calves as he catches up.  
  
  
  


Women’s eyes slide up tight and heavy against Rust as he navigates down the fluorescent-lit aisles with the stroller, following the lines of his shoulders and arms down to Lilah in one long sweep. For all their staring, he looks right on through them. Marty’s almost always nearby but may as well be another soup can display for all the attention they pay him, too busy stopping carts mid-stride and ignoring squabbling toddlers to cut their eyes over to Rust.

“In another life, this would’ve been one hell of a way to pick up women,” Marty says, strolling up with a bottle of coffee creamer in the basket hanging from his free hand. “Damn near every breathing female in this store has got an eye on you.”

“You jealous?” Rust asks, mouth just barely twitching, and Marty snorts as he inspects a box of cereal and sets it back on the shelf.

“Me?” Marty laughs. “Naw, I reckon I’m happily preoccupied.” He glances toward either end of the aisle and waggles his eyebrows at Rust. “They’re probably jealous of _me_.”

“I doubt that,” Rust says, and pushes the stroller to the next aisle—baby food and organics, about twenty miles off their beaten path—while Marty peruses a sale on cheerios. He spots the baby formula and scans over the different boxes and containers, trying to pick out the familiar yellow label when a voice like peach tea and butter mints strikes up from his left.

“Goodness gracious, ain’t she just a doll?” the woman says, stopping her shopping cart along the broadside of the stroller to peer inside. She’s wearing a pink tennis jacket with a pair of bifocals hanging from a rainbow-bejeweled chain around her neck. “Is this your sweet baby lamb?”

Rust blinks at her and settles his weight back on one hip, wrist resting casual over the handle. “No,” he tells her.

“Look at those pretty blue eyes she’s go—what?” The woman’s face looks genuinely perplexed, frozen over in the quiet, polite kind of horror southern women dole out like greeting cards. “What was that?”

“Well I didn’t steal her,” he says. “But she’s not—”

“What he _means,_ ” Marty says, thrusting himself into the aisle with a wild look on his face, basket swinging from one elbow, “is that she’s our granddaughter.”

“Yep,” he keeps on, flashing his good ole’ boy smile and leaning hard into his cane next to Rust, trying not to sound too winded. “Watching her while my daughter’s out of town on business. Prettiest little thing, ain’t she? You can really see the family resemblance.”

The woman looks between the two of them and then back at Lilah, mouth actually hanging open a fraction of an inch. A sweating carton of ice cream shifts in her cart and makes a slick _schluff_ sound as it slides diagonal down a cellophane-wrapped tray of pork chops.

“My word,” she breathes out, clutching loosely at her throat. “Now aren’t y’all the most precious thing I ever did lay eyes on. And here you got her all spiffed up in this outfit to boot, looking like a little baby snow angel? She might as well be a catalog picture.”

The woman waves her hand through the air, cutting through unseen evils like a Baptist preacher running on the Sabbath quota. “I’ll tell you what,” she says. “I’m sure you boys sure get a lot of trouble around these parts, but it’s damn fine to see a couple menfolk stepping up to the plate every which way for once. You ask me, it don’t matter who you’re rattling the headboard with—what you’re doing right here is all that matters in Jesus the Lord and Savior’s eyes.”

Rust reaches across himself without turning and plucks the yellow container of formula off the shelf, dropping it into the basket on Marty’s arm without much ceremony. “Thanks,” he says, just one word cut and dry, and turns to walk away.

There’s a dizzying kind of moment where Marty thinks his knees might give on the spot from sheer relief.

“I appreciate that,” he tells her, feeling like he’s wading through a water dream, head overstuffed with raw cotton. “It’s, uh—it’s real nice of you to say.”

They both watch Rust wordlessly push the stroller further down the aisle until the woman turns back to Marty, quirking a crayoned eyebrow.

“Well,” she says. “He ain’t much for talking, but you sure caught yourself one hell of a looker.”

“Ma’am,” Marty says, half-strangled because he’s trying not to laugh in earnest now. “You have no idea.”  
  


* * *  
  


The late afternoon and evening winds down and stretches out over manila files and email inquiries, three texts from Audrey and two sent in return, leftovers nuked in the microwave and two glasses of sweet tea, another changed shirt after Lilah spits up all down Marty’s back and murmured discussions on the floor over casework while the baby wriggles around on a blanket and pushes up off her tummy, watching the cat’s feather duster tail as it swishes just out of reach.

“She’s got that cat’s number,” Marty says about twenty to ten, setting a stack of paperwork aside to look between the two. “Soon as she starts crawling it’s game on.”

“Probably need to get this one ready to go down for the night,” Rust says after a quick glance at his watch, licking a middle finger to flip between pages before reaching out to straighten the twisted seam on Lilah’s bloomers. “Don’t imagine she makes a habit of staying up watching the late show.”

“Just jammies and a little freshening up, hmm?” Marty hums, maneuvering around to stretch out along his stomach to face the baby. She gurgles and reaches for his face, gently bopping her open hand against his nose. “Tell Poppy here it’s too early to go to bed yet,” Marty says, doing the itsy bitsy spider up her arm with two fingers. “He doesn’t know how to have any fun.”

Rust makes a rough noise in the back of his throat. “How about he doesn’t want to get whipped by mama and daddy when they come back tomorrow and find out _Grandpa_ had the baby up all night long chasing rabbits and howling at the fuckin’ moon.”

“My point stands,” Marty says with a grunt, though he draws back up until he’s kneeling and hitches Lilah up on his chest, climbing back to his feet with a tight grimace and some ado.

“C’mon, darlin’,” he tells Lilah with a stifled yawn, grabbing the diaper bag off the counter and heading back toward the bedroom, joints popping. “We’re waving the white flag, I guess.”

  
  
  
  
A quarter hour later finds all three of them slumped on the couch, Lilah buttoned up into her pajamas with a pacifier working in her mouth, wedged in the seam between Marty’s arm and side while a nature special drones on the television. Rust sits closest to the end table lamp with a book spine cracked and held open against his thigh, words starting to blur and blend together in smears of lettered greywash.

“What’re you over there studying?” Marty mumbles, idly watching meerkats scurry across the TV screen before glancing down at the pages open in Rust’s lap. “We’re off the clock.”

“Old poetry book I haven’t looked at in a while,” Rust says, blinking a few times to sharpen the print. “Nothing highfalutin.”

Marty clicks the television off and sets the remote aside, settling deeper against the cushions. “Why don’t you read a little bit for us,” he says, peering down at Lilah to check if she’s still awake. “Might help this one drop off.”

“Unrhymed verse about existential awakenings and the internal mirror of self,” Rust sighs, tucking one leg up underneath him. “Essential bedtime reading for the first year of life.”

“I’m sure she’ll be asking for the crib notes and your poetic insight,” Marty says, snorting. His free hand sneaks into the small space between them to squeeze Rust’s side, getting a tiny little shiver for his efforts. “How about she might just like listening to your Sam Elliot impression? Half the fucking reason I like to drive is because you’d knock me out cold running your mouth off if I rode shotgun.”

Rust huffs out a laugh. “Far cry from what you might’ve said back around ’95 somewhere.”

“Yeah, well,” Marty says. “It’s a little easier listening to your dulcet tones nowadays, content-wise.”

“ _Dulcet_ ,” Rust repeats in two soft syllables, foregoing the rest to cut his eyes over to Marty with a wisp of a smile. “You cashing that one in for ten bucks?”

“Probably spending too much time around your ass, start picking this shit up out of thin air,” Marty says, smoothing the hair on Lilah’s head before nodding at the book. “C’mon. Find us a good one.”

Rust blows out a heavy sigh but thumbs a few pages ahead, browsing through a handful of titles until he finds one that looks promising and starts reading aloud.

Any commentary on Marty’s part is kept to himself for the time being and Rust merely follows the rhythm of the verse, skimming over thirty-year-old notes in the yellowed margins to let one stanza bleed into the next. Three poems later there’s a familiar snuffling sound in his ear and he steps out of the text to look up and find both Marty and Lilah dozing where they sit, the binky in Lilah’s mouth still twitching in her sleep.

Rust rolls his neck and hoists himself off the couch before setting the dog-eared book on the coffee table. He’s just about to reach for Marty’s shoulder when he stops short, blinking at the picture laid out in front of him. He makes quick and careful work of walking to the kitchen counter and pads back across the carpet with his phone in hand, catching a rare glimpse of his own faint smile in the screen’s reflection.

It takes less than a minute for Audrey to answer.

 _that’s one for the scrapbook,_ she says. _now we just need one of all three of you._  
  


* * *  
  


Going by the alarm clock glowing through the velvet dark, Rust knows they’d put the baby down for the night almost three hours ago. Marty was out cold almost as soon as he’d hit the pillow, only taking enough time to slur something like _wake me up if she starts fussing, man, I can take her._

Marty had set up the bassinet on Rust’s side of the bed without a word, and there’d been no explanation given outside, “I get up to piss in the middle of the night, I’ll probably bump into it,” as he shuffled down the hall to the bathroom. It wasn’t the kind of thing that really mattered, not in the grand scheme, though he’d gotten a funny kind of look on his face when he came back in from brushing his teeth and found Rust on the edge of the mattress with his fingers draped light over the edge of the basket. Rust, just sitting there watching the baby breathe, like that alone was all he needed to settle some kind of personal truth.

That was a good few hours ago now, though, and Rust figures he’s been having a staring contest with the ceiling for just as long, trying to distinguish between the kind of blackness behind his eyelids and the one hanging stagnant above the bed. So when the baby first stirs and begins shaking off sleep with one quiet whimper and then another, building fast toward the promise of full-blown wailing, he’s up out of bed in an instant and finding her in the dark, trying not to be too relieved for having finally found an excuse.

“Shhh, shh,” he whispers with her tucked up under his chin, following the memory-lit path from the bedroom that leads him down the hall to the living room. She needs changing and he goes through the motions by way of the sole light burning above the kitchen sink, buttoning her back up into her pajamas while she kicks and starts stirring up a fit with newfound vigor.

The bottle he warms up in the microwave is spit back out between cries and if it weren’t so fucking cold Rust might take her out on the porch for some night air and starlight, though he settles for wandering in a loose circuit around the living room instead, falling too easy back into an innate rhythm of walk-bounce-shush he hasn’t paced in nearly three decades.

As he walks—with the warm weight held close against his chest, bare feet _shushing_ soft on the carpet—, there’s a moment where the night seems to split open, frame pried loose enough to let the past come rushing in like water. And it isn’t Claire he’s letting sleep down the hall, isn’t Sophia nuzzling against him in the half-dark, isn’t a little two bedroom fixer-upper in Texas with perennials blooming for the first time around the mailbox, but there’s a spare room still two acts of god away from looking partway decent and he’d helped Marty plant the yearling clementine tree out back the summer before, pulling it from a black plastic cocoon of potting soil and untangling the roots with their bare hands.

He’s got six bottles of Crystal hot sauce stockpiled in the pantry because Marty’d clipped a fucking coupon out of the paper, then a sixer of something honest-to-God snooty sitting in the fridge because maybe he likes it enough to have one or two with dinner a couple times a week. A pair of his boots by the front door, that old poetry book sitting amidst the clutter on the coffee table, his blue toothbrush in an old jelly glass down the hall, neck-and-neck with a yellow one that came in a goddamn value pack. A closet half-full of his clothes, the old red pickup parked in the driveway out front, a cat purring between them in the bed when the alarm doesn’t go off on weekend mornings.

And it ain’t the same but it’s close, he thinks. Achingly, dizzyingly close, an old vision unraveled and rewoven back into being, and when the right word finally sparks like a wood match behind his eyes there’s no use left in fighting it off, no use calling it by any other name.

He’d spent too many years and too many miles running from family to not know it by now.

Lilah’s starting to root around with frustrated little grunts, so he palms the still-warm bottle off the counter and makes another offering. She latches on eagerly this time, fawnlike lashes falling against her cheeks, and as she eats Rust makes another slow loop around the living room to draw in a few steadying breaths before he elbows off the light above the sink and retraces his steps down the hall.  
  
  
  
  


Marty slides easy out of a dream he won’t remember to the sound of Rust’s voice pitched low and easy, humming softly indistinct from somewhere above. He’s curled up on his side and cracks open one eye just enough to make out Rust sitting propped against a pillow under the blue glow of the muted television, holding Lilah up high on his chest.

There’s an empty formula bottle on the nightstand and Rust’s eyes are tired, lowered at half-mast as he rubs steady circles against the baby’s back. She whines and squirms against his shoulder, hell-bent on fighting sleep, and after a few moments he turns to her, nose and mouth skimming over the soft hair on top of her head.

“Shhh, Miss Lilah,” he murmurs, and one of her fists thumps against his collarbone, tiny fingers blooming open on instinct to splay across warm skin. “You gotta be quiet now, we’re gonna wake up grandpa.”

Rust keeps whispering and she slowly starts to settle against him, turning her face into the warmth of his neck. Most of what he says isn’t loud enough for Marty to catch, not much more than a gust of vowel-heavy breath, but he listens anyway, lying hidden under the guise of sleep.

“He takes real good care of me,” Rust says, eyes sinking shut. “Better than I ever would’ve done for myself. Gave me a lot things I probably don’t deserve, living the life I did, and I dunno if I could ever repay him for it. But I guess that’s the kinda debt you rack up when you love somebody.”

Marty tries to focus on keeping his breath held even, on keeping still, half-convinced he shouldn’t be allowed to hear any of this, like opening his eyes might scrub the moment out of existence and make it so it’d never happened at all. But it’s real, and Rust keeps talking, and all he can do is lay there and silently thank anybody who might be awake enough to listen.

“He worries about what your mama thinks a lot, after everything,” Rust says, briefly resting his mouth against Lilah’s temple. “But he’s a better man, even if he doesn’t know it, and he’ll take care of you, too. Kind of love he’s got is too big not to do that.”

A heavy kind of heat aches in the back of Marty’s throat and he has to swallow to try and knock it loose, formally decides the jig is up and puts on a drowsy sigh as he stirs around under the sheet, trying to make it sound like he’s rising up slowly out of a deeper sleep.

When he finally opens his eyes Rust is watching him, not moving beyond the energy it takes to muster up an easy blink.

“Should’ve woke me up,” Marty says, coughing light. “Could’ve given her a bottle just fine, let you rest.”

“M’alright,” Rust says, settling down a little more against the headboard. His eyes level on Marty, flicking brief over his face, until one hand reaches out to smooth two fingers over the cowlick above his ear. “Hope I didn’t wake you up.”

“You didn’t,” Marty says, maybe just a little too fast. “Just came up out of a dream, is all.”

“A bad one?”

“No,” Marty says, without any trace of a lie for once. “A good one.”

“Mmm,” Rust hums, letting his eyes drop back down to the baby. Her breathing has quieted, little rosebud mouth working idly in her sleep, and he makes to get back up, swinging one leg over the side of the bed to carry her back to the bassinet.

“Set her down for a minute,” Marty says, patting the space in the bed between them. The world is still asleep behind the window blinds but he wants to stay here under the sleepy weight of this moment as long as he can manage, watching Rust by glowing light of the TV screen. “She’ll be alright here between us.”

Rust pulls his leg back into bed but his joints seem to lock up and tighten on their own accord, body held like a whitetail standing at the edge of an open field at morning.

“She’ll be okay, Rust,” Marty repeats, softer than before. “I’ll stay up with her if you drop off.” He sits suspended in a pool of silence before Rust finally moves, strong hands easing the baby down onto the bed between them.

He shifts down onto his side until he’s settled with one elbow braced up under his neck, reaching down to draw the sheet up past the flannel sweats knotted at his waist. Marty smiles, just enough to give himself away, and reaches out to smooth his thumb over the crown of Lilah’s head, tracing around the tiny shell of her ear.

“Been a while since I got to do this,” he says, watching her chest rise and fall. “Feels like Audrey was about the same size not too long ago.”

“Bet you’re glad this one’s on temporary loan,” Rust says, gaze hidden under his lashes. He reaches out and gently takes her hand, holding it between two fingers and a thumb, and breathes deep, once, in and out. “It’s something real special, though,” he says. “To be able to watch them grow.”

Marty doesn’t quite look at Rust when he next opens his mouth, tries and finds he can’t trust himself to get the words out in one piece if he does.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m real glad we get to do it together.”  
  


* * *  
  


Sunday evening comes and goes, bringing Audrey and Orren and the promise of a morning freeze warning with it. They stay for a quick dinner on Marty’s behest but don’t linger too long after the dishes are stacked in the sink, trailing outside in a single file with Audrey holding Lilah at the lead and all three men toting diapers, strollers, and bassinets in her wake.

One trip loads up the car and they stand in the driveway amidst a cloud of rising breath after the trunk slams, trading hugs and handshakes and dates like promises, though perhaps these days they’re promises meant to be kept.

“Alright Miss Delilah,” Audrey says, pulling the tiny knit hat down with one hand while Orren cranks the car to start warming it up. “Time to tell Grandpa and Poppy bye bye.”

“Gotta steal some sugar before you go,” Marty says, pressing a kiss to Lilah’s forehead. He steps back for a moment and then leans back in real quick, laughing a little weakly. “Just one more,” he says, kissing the baby again before straightening to press one light into Audrey’s hair.

“Thanks for letting us watch her, honey,” he says. “Whenever you want to bring her—I mean, we can even come over that way if you want, make it easier.” He sighs and falls back next to Rust, stuffing his hands into his jean pockets. “Sure do wish we lived a little closer.”

“We’ll figure something out,” Audrey says, watching them with her bottom lip caught between her teeth. “You might have to bargain with Mom for her every once in a while, but I’d—I’d like that a lot.”

Rust steps forward in one fluid movement, gently leans over to bump his mouth against the top of baby’s hat and squeezes Audrey’s elbow in the same breath, moving so sure and fast Marty knows he’d have missed it if he took the time to blink.

“We’ll have to get that photo next time,” he says, giving her just the barest brush of  a wink, and while Marty’s face pinches up in confusion Audrey stands on her tiptoes with the baby in her arms, presses a kiss to Rust’s cheek and laughs sweet enough to chase the cold away.  
  
  
  
  


Marty makes it a little past eight o’clock before he can’t take it anymore.

He’d meant to come in from the side with a more delicate approach, maybe wait for Rust to say something about the weekend and the baby—anything to prompt him, anything to make it easier—, but Rust always had a way of not opening his mouth the second you finally decided you wanted him to and before Marty knows what’s what he’s rattling off in a fumbling avalanche, spilling a stomach full of butterflies with wings a furious shade of blushing pink into the open air between them.

“I heard what you said last night,” he rushes out, staring at the open file in Rust’s lap, then where their thighs are pressed together on the couch. “To the baby while you thought I was sleepin’. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, I just woke up and couldn’t…well. Just—there you were, y’know. There you were.”

He sucks in a deep breath and swallows, practically verging on lightheaded. “I don’t know if I heard it all, but it was enough, Rust. Maybe more than enough.”

Rust draws up slowly and turns to find Marty’s eyes, setting the file aside. “Wasn’t just any kind of bedtime story,” he says. “Meant what I said.”

Marty makes to open his mouth but Rust shakes his head to stop him, eyes cut down low. “You’ve given me a lot of things, Marty,” he says, so quiet Marty has to lean in closer to hear him. “For a long time I thought it was just you yourself, because maybe I deserved that much—maybe we deserved each other, coming out of the dark. But even if that were the case, even if all I’d walked away with was you, it’d be everything. It’d be every fucking thing.”

“What do you mean?” Marty manages to ask, reaching out to brush his palm against Rust’s side, tentative, fingers just barely grazing the mottled crescent moon hidden under his shirt.

Rust laughs, once, rattling hoarse around the edges. “What I fucking mean,” he says, eyes falling shut, “is that when I say I’m going home, Marty, it means I’m coming home to you.”

He sits there under the lull of the television with his breath drawn out deep and slow, not moving even when Marty’s hands come to rest on either side of his face, holding him there in something like reverence while he leans in to find Rust’s mouth with his. It’s a chaste little kiss, soft and feather-light, and Marty can’t help but smile, lips curling up into a full-blown grin pressed there against Rust’s.

Rust’s eyes blink back open, hazy and warm, but he doesn’t pull away. “What?” he rasps.

“Nothin’,” Marty says, and leans back in to kiss him again. "Was just figuring something out."  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the three-week wait, folks, but the Halloween challenge tripped me up for a spell and then getting this written turned out to be some kind of Herculean task. I do have something to show for my absence, though, so if you feel so inclined you can go read ["two pumpkins & a couple sixers"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2517515/chapters/5592860), which essentially takes place in this verse but without any of my current timeline-specific details. 
> 
> The next two chapters of this bad boy are jumping straight into Christmas, so hold on tight!


	26. something magic

Winter finally snaps out across Louisiana and doesn’t ease up or relent, leaving early December to sag heavy over the earth like a grey blanket of wet wool. It’s a peculiar kind of cold, all things considered—the kind that has Rust eyeballing the derelict coat he hasn’t touched inside three years where it hangs in the hall closet, only half-listening to the weatherman rattle off feverishly about a hard freeze coming down over the weekend.

Marty fusses over the clementine tree in the back yard, takes an old sheet out there and drapes it over the thin branches like he’s tucking it in goodnight. Rust rolls the garbage can out to the curb and watches him limp through the grass without his cane, sizing up azaleas and snow on the mountain bushes and his one little aloe plant, trying to finger how each one could stand up in a fight with the frost.

“Fuckin’ freezing out here,” he mutters, stomping up onto the driveway to stand next to Rust. He’s wearing jeans and orange and brown-striped flannel, a pair of beat-up old Cats laced crooked where he missed a few eyelets. The tip of his nose is pink from rubbing it and Rust can smell the warmth on him, hidden up under the cold resting heavy in the soft fabric of his shirt.

“Ain’t that bad,” Rust says, with the old black bird on his arm peeking out from under pushed-up sleeves to taste the bitter air. “Winter of ’98 was worse.”

Marty snorts out a cloud of breath and rubs his hands together, chafing dry. “Says the man who lived in Alaska for probably half his collective life. You don’t got any room to talk about what us thin-blooded folks call cold.”

“I don’t suppose you’d ever give any thought to going up there,” Rust says casual, watching Marty pick at a frayed string coming off the hem of his shirt.  
  
“What?” Marty asks, snapping the thread and letting it flutter off into the grass. He looks up and peers at Rust’s face for a moment, like he’s trying to pull a different string loose, and the light in his eyes flickers and changes. “Maybe I would,” he says, a little more carefully. “Never said I’d write it off completely. You—you’re not thinking about going up there again, are you?”

“You don’t have to look so scared, Marty,” Rust says, breath cutting soft into the cold air between them. “I figure it’s plenty cold enough for me down here nowadays.”

“Yeah, but don’t you ever make me drag my ass up there without you pulling the lead,” Marty says, eyes thrown elsewhere, but when his hand bumps light against Rust’s hip they both know it wasn’t an accident. “You know I can’t read an atlas for shit.”

Rust reaches out and rests a hand on Marty’s side above his hipbone, light but steady, and thinks about the bullet-torn scar hidden somewhere beneath flannel and the pad of his thumb. “Where do I have left to go,” he asks, watching the line of Marty’s throat work, “that I wouldn’t take you with me?”

“Dunno,” Marty says, tensed up like an old spooked horse, and Rust waits until he feels the other man’s muscles ease and unfurl beneath his hand before letting it drop away. The next few words Marty breathes out are meant to be flippant but taste like relief in the back of Rust’s throat. “There’s that one biker bar in Texas.”

“There’s only one place I can think of,” Rust says, with a clear, untroubled thought about liquid darkness, and before he can think any further a voice is calling out behind them from across the street, high and feminine and loosely warbled.

“Mr. Hart!” the voice calls, echoing sharp down the otherwise empty block. “Martin!”

Rust and Marty turn in toward one another to look over their shoulders, vapored breath mingling together in one rising fog. The line of Marty’s jaw sets tight for a split second before slackening, settling easy into the kind of smile Rust knows is part of a finely-practiced skill set.

“Well hey, Miss Dolly,” he says, slipping his hands into his pockets. “What brings you out into the cold?”

The woman looks like she might be around Rust’s age—slender and pale, with a straight blonde bob and her arms wrapped around herself, hands rubbing into the warmth of a beige sweater. She walks through the grass until she stands on the edge of the rain gutter on her side of the street, not stepping any further into the river of black asphalt cutting between them.

“We haven’t seen you around much since—well, since all that unfortunate business happened a few months back.” She falters only for a second, but even from where he stands Rust can see her eyes wavering on him. “Have you heard about the block party?”

“No ma’am,” Marty tosses back, kindly enough. “Not a word.”

“Coming up the Saturday after next, just a little neighborhood get-together before the holiday down by the Walkers’ place.” Dolly clears her throat and tucks her hands up under her armpits, bouncing once in place as her eyes move from Marty back to Rust. “You’re both more than welcome to come, if you’d like.”

Marty laughs soft and light, like he’s remembering the ghost of an old joke. “Appreciate that,” he tells her. “I’ll have to consult with the committee, here—see if we’ve got anything else on the calendar, but I’ll definitely be thinking about it.”

“Alrighty then,” she says a little blandly, already trudging backward through the grass. “Don’t worry about bringing anything, there’ll be more than plenty to go around.”

Dolly turns without waving and follows the sidewalk back up to her drive moving on careful steps, briefly stopping to fetch the mail before disappearing inside.

“Let’s head on in,” Marty sighs when she’s gone, starting the trek back up the house and wincing a little as his knee creaks. “Yard’s just gonna have to take it as it comes, I can’t do nothing else to help it.”

Rust sucks down a long pull of air as he walks, letting the cold burn clean in his lungs. “Seems she was acting a little off-kilter,” he says, close to Marty’s shoulder.

“Don’t reckon she’s gotten a good handle on you yet,” Marty says, stepping past Rust’s truck into the garage. “You don’t do too much socializing with the neighbors, after all, outside giving the old man across the way a goddamn heart attack the time you went to get the morning paper with your fuckin’ stitches out and proud.”

He drops down into an open lawn chair by the door leading inside and bends at the waist to start undoing his laces. “I imagine Dufresne still has them shook up pretty bad. Normal people—well, people who aren’t you and me ain’t used to that kind of shit. She just don’t know what to say. Can’t say I fucking blame her.”

“She don’t know what to say about what happened,” Rust says, watching Marty’s hands while he works. “Or she don’t know what to say about you and me.”

“Shit,” Marty laughs, pulling his boots off and slumping back in the chair to look up at Rust. “Let’s see—I lived here nearly ten years by myself, not a goddamn peep, they all got a load of the Filipino girl I was seeing on the regular for about a year, and then last summer I’m in the news for helping uncover a backwater serial killer, I’m shacking up with you out of the blue, we get a damn housecat, and a year later I got a motherfucking madman shooting up the place on a home delivery call.”

Rust grunts and holds out a hand. “You wanna go to this Christmas thing they’re putting on or what?”

“I should’ve asked if Byron was bringing some of that kicked-up eggnog,” Marty says, gripping Rust’s hand and letting the other man help hoist him back to his feet. “Shit’s so strong it’ll put some hair on that chest of yours.”

He pauses a moment, blinking a few times. “Since when are you interested in any kind of party?”

“Just figure we can go, if you want,” Rust says. “It ain’t no big thing.”

“If I ever had to make a bet on that coming out of your mouth,” Marty says with a laugh, punching the garage door button before following Rust in through the laundry room, “I’d have lost a whole lot more than money.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Marty’s back out in the garage a few nights later, kicking storage totes around and eyeballing the best patch of floor for the exercise bike they hauled home from the office when he finds the box.

He’s been real careful ever since that day spent cleaning out the spare room—not prying into places or things he maybe shouldn’t be looking at without clearance, figurative and literal alike—, but this one looks harmless enough, save for the fact he can’t figure out what the fuck it’s doing there.

The box rattles with the telltale sound of broken glass when he moves it aside, and with only one little half-guilty glance over his shoulder he pops the lid open and finds exactly that. There are two dark blue bottles with the labels peeled away, a hand-sized shard of silver-backed mirror, and about a pound of broken fragments, nestled atop a thin layer of newspaper in an assorted rainbow of greens, pinks, yellow, and one piece of opaque white milk glass.

Marty stares at the glass for a few seconds and then replaces the lid, quickly rearranging the box just the way he’d found it. He sets up the exercise bike in the corner a few feet away and by the time Rust walks out into the garage with a bottle of water just shy of a half-hour into his first cycle, his knee’s one octave short of screaming and he’s gone and forgotten all about it.  
  
  
  
  
The following morning Marty wakes ten ‘til seven and reaches over into the space next to him, fingers brushing nothing but cold air before he realizes he’s in bed alone. Their work alarm won’t go off for another forty-five minutes but he sits up anyhow, massaging into his stiff knee for a few moments while the coffee maker gurgles and spits down the hall. He feels around for the cane he leaves leaning against the bedside table and pushes off the bed, bypassing the bathroom to walk to the front of the house.

Rust is nowhere to be found but his phone and keys still sit on the kitchen counter, the cat crouched over and crunching around a fresh scoop of food left in her bowl. Marty checks the back porch and makes sure the truck’s parked in the driveway before he opens the door leading to the garage, finding himself almost nose-to-nose with Rust standing on the other side of the jamb with one hand still outstretched to take the handle.

“The hell you doing out here?” Marty asks, trying to sound sleepy-casual, but then a furtive look thrown over Rust’s shoulder reveals that the box of colored glass has moved from where he left it the night before and his stomach drops like a lead sinker.

“Nothin’,” Rust says, blinking, standing there in a pair of sweatpants and a flannel unbuttoned over his chest. “What’re you doing up?”

“Wondering why the fuck the bed’s so cold,” Marty says, swallowing a little dryly. He makes himself blind to the box and turns to walk back into the kitchen. “Get in here out of that meat locker, looks like we got enough time to make breakfast proper now.”

Rust moves to follow without another word, but Marty doesn’t miss him quickly ducking off to the side, dropping the folded square of sandpaper in his hand behind the bin of newspapers before coming in behind him.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


There’s a handful of days where they dance around one another throughout the weekend and evenings after work—roaming off in separate cars under the guise of running errands and meeting back up empty-handed for dinner, sitting behind closed doors and reemerging in a thin shroud of pliant mystery acting like it’s all business as usual, like they’re not under the influence of any kind of seasonal spell when they both damn well know what the other’s doing.

Marty’s just thankful the feeling seems mutual, because Rust’s immortalized reputation as the better box man ain’t any kind of mere propaganda and if he ever felt so inclined to wheedle out the truth, there’s no doubt he’d have Marty wrung out and broken down in about fifteen minutes flat, roaming lips and sure hands notwithstanding.

And it’s downright uncomfortable, thinking about Rust navigating through a shopping mall alone—doing anything there at all, really, much less buying goddamn Christmas presents. But Marty hasn’t seen hide nor hair of a logo-branded bag or a roll of wrapping paper in the house that he didn’t bring in himself, and it eventually occurs to him like a truth he should’ve known from the get-go that anything Rust would give him probably couldn’t be bought and boxed in a store.

Rust doesn’t stray too far from the house after one or two peculiar solo outings, but it takes him about a week of early mornings spent out in the garage—mornings that Marty carefully sidesteps, confining himself to the sunrise news and his old flannel robe, wordlessly passing a cup of coffee off to Rust when he finally pads back into the kitchen—before he finishes whatever he’d been doing out there with the kaleidoscope guts of that box.

But Marty’s got his own secrets to keep, one big and one small no matter which way you look at it, and carefully tucks them both away for safekeeping inside moments where Rust isn’t looking. One lands in the back of the closet in the spare room, shrouded in sleek black nylon and hidden behind his untouched rain coat and that blue windbreaker from back when they still worked the beat.  The other he keeps in the pocket of a denim jacket he hasn’t worn in probably thirty years, a bonafide relic, sun-faded and scuffed and embellished on the back with old rodeo patches, one shoulder bearing the almost washed-out handwriting of Maggie Herbert before she became Maggie Hart.

Some nights he’ll lie awake with Rust breathing soft and easy next to him in some kind of twisted role reversal, counting down the days to the twenty-fifth like he hasn’t since before the girls. Since before Maggie, even, thinking back to those far-flung years as a boy when he’d hop out of bed on Christmas morning and fly down the stairs—stomach tied up in trembling butterfly knots—with an unwavering kind of wonder and belief in the possibility of something magic.

The magic’s long since gone nowadays, stamped out and resigned to death two lifetimes ago, but the wonder’s still there. Maybe of a different sort, though, with the nerves still camped tense and hot somewhere in the softness up under his rib cage.

But then Rust will slowly blink awake on those nights, warm and rough with sleep, and mumble _you’re thinking so hard I could hear you dreamin’_ while his hands reach out to find Marty in the dark.

And maybe it isn’t magic, Marty thinks, but it’s sure as hell something.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The last Saturday before Christmas dawns and slowly begins to wane, and around five o’clock that evening Marty goes out to get the mail and watches Walker and son pitch up an open canopy tent down the street while his old lady strings a row of icicle lights from the scaffolding. Somebody’s set up a couple orange cones in the road, keeping any passing traffic to one lane, and the smoky smell of a barbecue already hangs heavy in the cold air.

He goes back inside to where Rust’s folded down onto the couch, squinting at something on his laptop with a lukewarm cup of coffee balanced on one knee, and slaps and slides his right hand over the countertop on his way into the kitchen so his ring clinks twice on the formica.

“You got shit to do?” he asks, rattling around in the dishwasher. “Didn’t have any big plans for dinner.”

Rust blackens the screen and sets his laptop aside, lifting the coffee to his mouth. “If you want to go to that thing down the street,” he says, lips ghosting against the rim of the cup, “you could just say so.”

Marty swings the cabinet door open with a laugh and starts putting dishes away one at a time. “Guess what I’m wanting to know,” he says, thumbing at a spot on a tea glass before looking at Rust from under his brows, “is if you’re planning on going with me.”

“Do you want me to come, Marty?” Rust asks, resting his coffee back against his knee. His face is drawn neutral, eyes dipping down into one of those sleepy half-blinks.

“Well,” Marty says, turning away to stack plates in the cupboard. “I reckon I do.”

“All right,” Rust says, standing from the couch, and the next time he speaks he’s up behind Marty in the kitchen, bracing a hand around the sharp edge of the cabinet door before the other man can straighten and crack his head into it. “Then I’m coming.”

“You sure?” Marty asks. “Last time I remember you going to a Christmas party, somehow the tree tinsel down in the station lobby caught fire and nobody could figure out where the fuck you were.”

“That wasn’t me,” Rust says with the tiniest hitch in the back of his throat, turning to slip down the hall. “You gonna be warm enough in that jacket?”

   
  
  


They walk down the street together under the curtain of winter twilight, the sun still hanging by one amber fingertip on the horizon through the trees. The tent is up and the Christmas lights sparkle blue and white above the neighborhood tenants milling about, nursing beers and sipping glasses of eggnog through their laughter, picking around finger foods and shooing a screaming herd of kids away from the three-legged punch table.

“Alright,” Marty says on approach, cutting his eyes over to Rust. “I’m not saying nothing—but if you feel like you gotta bow out, what’s our story gonna be?”

Rust laughs low under his breath. “Don’t need one. Much as you’re wont to believe it, Marty, I’m not so much of a social pariah that I can’t fucking talk to people.”

Marty gestures toward the tent with his cane mid-stride, huffing out a cloud of breath. “Well listen, these are your run-of-the-mill _people_. They’re gonna ask you shit like why you’re still driving a ’95 Ford and if you want their brother to give you a quote on a paint job, if you tried the Waldorf salad yet—where you got your rugged Alaskan wilderness jacket, which I’m sure wasn’t out of any goddamn department store catalog.”

“It was on sale at a Sears in Montana,” Rust says, watching the headlights of a passing car trail past. “And maybe I’ve been wanting a quote on some new paint.”

“Okay,” Marty says, putting on a smile as they step into the throw of light bleeding out from under the tent. “I’m cuttin’ you loose.”

Rust walks alongside him in tandem and it’s like Marty’s switch flips the moment he steps under the canopy, all wide grins and rolling laughter, taking hands both familiar and not and already cracking off jokes about his cane like he wasn’t handling it like a snake the whole month prior. He blazes the trail and Rust moves around him in an easy orbit, shaking hands and exchanging short little greetings, always content to step back and let Marty take the lead on this kind of thing not because that’d been the way it was for as far back as he could remember, but because Marty had always been good at it.

“You must be—Rust, right?” a stout little man in glasses says, holding out a plastic cup of eggnog in one hand and a beer in the other. Rust takes the beer with a nod and the man keeps the cup for himself, drawing off a sip with a tight little hiss as he peers up over the rims of his glasses. “Byron Brigand. Good to see you come out, man. We were starting to think Marty kept you locked up in a room under the kitchen floor or something.”

“That’s actually where I keep him,” Rust deadpans, tipping his beer back to take a long pull, and Byron chokes into his eggnog so hard it spatters up onto his glasses.

Another woman walks up to join them and Rust spots Dolly a few yards away over her shoulder, eyes laying heavy on him from a sharp angle, speaking in low tones to a young woman with Christmas tinsel wrapped up in her hair. He catches her eye with a quirked brow and she quickly looks away, moving to greet an older man with snowy hair and a cigar crammed in the corner of his mouth.

“It took me a while to recognize you,” the new woman standing next to Byron says, after taking a bite out of a deli spiral and introducing herself as Maritza. She smiles a little lopsided, swirling punch around in her cup while she cuts fleeting looks at Rust like she can’t take him in all at once head-on. “I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you look a lot—well, a lot better than you did last year on the news. Younger, I think. Maybe it’s the shorter hair.”

“Could be,” Rust says lightly, easing his weight back onto one hip, trying not to look too thankful for the reprieve when Maritza turns on a dime to shout after one of her kids sneaking past with a plate mounded high with cookies.

Byron drifts off and Rust slowly gravitates back to Marty, who is on his second round of hard eggnog and in the midst of the story about Ronald Whey and their summertime rundown—told with a lot more high-impact action on their part than Rust remembers, and then with the carefully skirting omission of what, exactly, happened to that bag of weed. 

“You two really got your work cut out for you,” a man in a Saints jersey with a crew cut says, using the neck of his beer bottle to point between the both of them. Rust rolodexes back through introductions and thinks his name starts with an _H_ —Harold or Hugh or Henry, with a handshake like a dead trout. “And then what with all that shit that went down at your place a couple months back? Jesus Christ, talk about bringing work home with you.”

Marty’s laughter sobers up a little at that, smile still in place but quickly dimming. “Well, I dunno how much that tied in with what we’re doing these days,” he says, clearing his throat. “That was more along the lines of what we used to do working with the state police—what we thought we’d wrapped up last year with Carc—with the murder cult. Residual trash kind of thing.”

“Fuckin’ A, man,” the guy says, and earns a withering look from his wife that doesn’t do much to faze him. “You gotta go through and tell us what went down, full monty. One of the cops out front said you’d blown the guy’s brains to kingdom come, said it was like a fucking horror show in there. I told Jen here—I said there’s no way they’re gonna clean that sonofabitch out of the carpet.”

Rust watches Marty’s throat work for a moment, wonders if he needs to step in and deflect, head this motherfucker off at the draw, and then Marty shakes his head like he’s tossing a thought away, knocking back another mouthful of eggnog.

“Listen, Hank—this probably ain’t the kind of stuff we need to be talking about at a Christmas party.” He laughs but his eyes briefly meet Rust’s, just the barest brush of something that reads private between them, and then he’s pointing off down the street somewhere behind Hank’s shoulder. “Speaking of horror shows, haven’t you been working on restoring that old Cutlass you got at auction? What kind of mileage you got racked up on that thing?”

Rust leaves them to it and wanders off to the far side of the long tent, taking a swig off his beer and then one off the cool night air. A couple young school-aged kids sit together at the edge of somebody’s driveway a few yards off, a boy and girl roundabout seven or eight, sprawled amidst an overturned metal scooter and a remote controlled car the boy keeps making speed through the rain gutter.

“Take it off the sewer like a ramp,” the little girl says, pointing an elbow toward the concrete drain at the street corner, and the boy pushes his knit cap up out of his eyes and doesn’t waste any time in lining the car up for the big jump. Rust watches without comment as he revs it up to top speed and proceeds to send it flying several feet through the air into a bed of concrete, and with a plastic crack and one long scrape it comes down hard, one wheel bouncing off on impact and rolling into the night.

“Aww man!” the boy yelps, tossing the remote control into the girl’s lap and scurrying into the street. He picks up the wrecked car and then trudges over to find the wheel, standing there looking at both in his hands like the bones of a fallen hero.

“Totaled,” he says in a put-on adult voice, and Rust can’t help but crack a smile as he brings his beer back up to his mouth, watching the boy collapse back down next to the girl with a long-suffering sigh. “‘M gonna have to junk it.”

Rust lets them sit there for a moment longer before he pushes off the tent pole he’d been leaning against, coming in from a wide angle with loose, easy steps. The kids look up to watch him approach and he puts a small smile back on, nodding toward the car sitting between the boy’s feet.

“Want me to call you a tow?” he asks, and when the boy shakes his head he stops a few feet away, watching the Christmas lights strung along the surrounding houses blink and twinkle around them. “Maybe I can take a look at that wheel.”

Two minutes later Rust is crouched down on the ground with his beer resting by his knee, finally popping the tire back onto the axel and giving it an experimental spin. “Give that a whirl,” he says, putting his pocket knife away and handing the car back to the boy, and when he flips the switch and gives it some juice it runs just as good as new, the long wound in the paint and a cracked front fender aside.

“Thanks,” the boy says, grinning outright now, and he and the girl peer up at Rust as he straightens back into standing, knees faintly popping and complaining on the way back up.

The little girl’s hair is braided into long pigtails and she twists one around her finger, dark eyes not quite wavering from Rust’s. Something about her gaze makes him feel small, somehow, not fully adept or too certain about much of anything, and when she opens her mouth he isn’t sure he could ever predict what might come out.

“Are you Mr. Hart, too?” she asks without any prelude, soft features gone quietly serious. “Mommy says you’re Mr. Hart’s husband.”

Rust hears himself breathe out sudden, a gust of startled wind that’s maybe a little less laughter in exchange for something else. He swirls the last few sips of beer around the bottom of his bottle and shakes his head, eyes thrown somewhere out into the night before they come back to the girl.

“Well,” he says, shifting his weight around. “We ain’t married, but I guess that might be close enough.”

“Okay,” the little girl says, like that’s all she needed to know, and then looks beyond Rust into the long stretch of tent, already moved onto the next pressing thought. “Ollie,” she asks, “is Mr. Hank telling jokes again?”

Rust turns to the side and clocks Marty from about twenty yards, still standing at the far end of tent with a herd of neighbors. The buzzing hum of laughter from before is gone, and he’s got his shoulders squared up with his chin lifted ever so slightly in a stance Rust knows all too well.

He leaves the kids behind and breezes easy back under the canopy, listening to his own quiet breathing and the steady beat of blood moving through his ears. Marty hasn’t moved and he slows on approach to hang back for a moment, stopping to pick a piece of broccoli off a veggie tray, and listens to the rest of the conversation unroll before him.

“I’m just saying,” Hank says a little thickly, “maybe you’re inviting shit like that into your life, living there with him and all.”

Marty gives a sharp shake of his head, eyes nearing the kind of coldness hard enough to splinter and crack. “What’re you saying to me right now, Hank?” he asks. “I want you to tell me exactly what you’re suggesting about me and my life.”

“Don’t know how specific I can get, being there’s kids here and all, but I think you know damn well what I’m talking about,” the other man says, not quite meeting Marty’s eye. “It ain’t any big secret what you’re doing. And when you start steppin’ off course like that, I figure some hell’s bound to catch up with you sooner or later.”  
  
“That’s funny,” Marty says in a voice eerily calm, taking one step forward, “because I don’t recall one iota of it being any of your fucking busi—”

Rust makes a decision in a split-hair second and closes the distance between himself and Marty in a handful of easy strides, sliding up into the group with his eyes cast calm, standing at an angle that has Marty’s shoulder pressing into the heart of his sternum.

“How’s it going over here?” he asks, listening to the gust of wind that rushes fast out of Marty’s lungs. He reaches up to take the other man’s hand in his own without pause, wrapping their fingers together around the cup of eggnog so he can tip it forward to meet his lips.

“Shit that’s strong,” he murmurs, gently dropping Marty’s hand but not moving any further away, line of sight tossed out nowhere in particular. “One round of that and you’d be talking out your ass all night.”

All eyes are on them but Rust doesn’t falter, standing there with two fingers resting light on Marty’s hip until the other man draws in a steadying breath and says, “Yeah, maybe we’ve all had enough.”

Hank’s eyes dart between them but he doesn’t make any move to speak, only blinks a couple times and turns away, strolling out across the pavement and tossing the rest of his drink—cup and all—into the dying flowers around the nearest mailbox.

The crowd breaks up and dissolves after that and Rust can smell the shame rolling off most of them in waves, stinking hot and ugly through the cold. When they mostly clear out he guides Marty over to the corner near the punch bowl, meticulously pouring out two cups with the plastic ladle to busy his itching hands.

“You alright?” he asks quietly, coaxing the eggnog out of Marty’s grip and replacing it with the punch. “Thought I was gonna have to pry a cane out of that fucker’s ass.”

“Fuck him,” Marty mutters, and when he steps back out under the night sky Rust moves with him, both of them blinking against the few visible pinpricks of hot white. “I’m alright,” he reassures, without much convincing feeling. “It’s just some real bullshit, you know? Standing there saying that shit to me in front of you. Like you’re some kind of—fuck, man, I don’t even know. Makes me fucking sick.”

He hisses sharp through his teeth and takes a swig of his drink, cutting his eyes back over to Rust where they seem to soften on impact. “Thank God you got good timing. I was starting to wonder where you’d run off to.”

“Was helping a couple of the kids with something,” Rust says, and then feels the corners of his mouth pull up into a smile despite it all, despite everything. “They were wantin’ to know if we were married.”

Marty’s cup falters in his hand and sloshes a sip or two out onto the pavement before he gets a firm grip on it again. “You’re shitting me,” he croaks out, staring at Rust. “They did not.”

“Mhmmm,” Rust hums. “Sure did.”

“That don’t bother you at all?” Marty asks. “The—idea of it?” He shakes his head, laughing a little. “Jesus Christ. Straight from the mouths of babes.”

“Why would it bother me?” Rust asks, with Marty standing close enough to him that he can smell a faint note of cologne, a familiar scent now, light and clean and all too welcome on the nights and mornings when he leans forward to nose into it.

“I don’t know,” Marty says, looking down at his feet, the Christmas lights, Rust’s hands. “But I’m glad it doesn’t.”

And even when Hank excuses himself and turns in early on the pretense of having to be off somewhere in the morning, Rust sticks close to Marty’s side, listening to the other neighbors prattle off about yard fertilizer and the best place to get boudin in Lafayette, if they’d been to the flea market off the interstate and if Rust would ever be interested in selling his truck to Kitty Swanson’s 16-year-old boy, because that’s the kind of thing you want a young kid driving these days—something older and nothing too flashy, with trucks always tending to fare better in accidents and all.

“Appreciate the offer,” Rust tells them, “but I’ve put a lot of miles on that truck, and it’s seen a lot of hard road with me. I don’t know if I’m ready to give it up just yet.”

  
  


Back home, Rust watches Marty shower and go through his nightly routine without a word, laughter and warmth clipped off to the quick with the air around him smarting outright and gone brassy plum like a fresh-earned bruise.

There used to be a time where he would’ve sidestepped something like this, let the blood settle and fade to green on its own, but when he walks in from the bathroom and finds Marty lying prone on his side of the bed staring hard enough to peel the plaster off the ceiling, he wonders if it’d do him any sort of good to reach out and press a thumb against the soft contusion, not digging deep but resting there in a quiet way of saying _I noticed_.

Marty doesn’t move when Rust drops his towel and pulls on a pair of sweatpants, doesn’t say anything when the lights cut out and the mattress dips down as the other man slides in beside him, whispering across the sheets to curl in on his side.

“Be a shame if all four tires on that Cutlass came up flat a couple weeks from now,” Rust says, voice cutting easy through the blackness. “Maybe by the time it’s all pretty and fixed up.”

A second later Marty is laughing soft under his breath, reaching up to rub his fingers into his eyes until he sees spots of blue. “Guess we’re gonna start moonlighting as a couple car vandals,” he says. “Set Hank up with Steve in a fuckin’ bowling league.”

Rust hums low in something akin to agreement and then Marty is wringing out a tight wisp of a sigh, pressing against the night’s bruises on his own accord.

“It’s not even about the queer shit,” he says. “Well, I mean it is, because I never thought—Jesus, that just ain’t what this is. But that’s not even the worst goddamn part of it.”

Rust lets him work through it for a moment, not quite touching Marty by lying close enough to follow his little movements through the dark.

When Marty breaks back in he almost sounds rushed. “I get worried sometimes, Rust, like you might think what he said is true, that you’re some kind—some kinda burden on me.” He stalls out for a moment, hands skimming soft over the sheets, and then speaks more carefully. “Because you aren’t. There really ain’t anything further from the fucking truth.”

Quiet settles in while Rust’s lies still, eyes open against the darkened room around them. “You think that whatever came out his mouth is gonna change anything?” he asks. “That I give a shit?”

“Suppose not,” Marty says, and then with a little more feeling, “No—no.”

“So fuck him,” Rust says. “You’re not obliged to answer to anybody but yourself and the girls. Everything else is dead fucking airspace, man. Took me a while to figure that out, but you live a whole lot easier once you do.”

“And you,” Marty says, shifting around on his side. “Obliged to answer to you.”

“Naw,” Rust says after a few beats of silence, clearing his throat. His hand comes up to trace easy over Marty’s side, settling in the soft dip between his hip and rib cage while he shifts around to press their knees together. “Only if you want to.”

“Reckon I do,” Marty says, and closes in on the rest of the space stretched between them.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The phone rings early on Sunday morning over coffee and toast, and Marty keeps his mug firmly clenched in hand, holding out the cordless unit a couple feet from his face to squint one-eyed at the display before he recognizes the number and answers.

“Hey darlin’,” he says on pickup, and Rust promptly lowers the newspaper to peer over the top, forgoing the hard news to catch a read on Marty’s tone instead. “How you been doing? And—Rowley? Oh shit, Raleigh, yeah. He good?”

“Me and Rust?” he says after a pause. “Oh, you know how it goes, same old story. Didn’t have too much planned, just thought about getting a roast chicken or something, keeping it casual.” Marty swallows a mouthful of coffee and then sets his mug down, eyebrows knitting together tight. “Your mama said—hold up now, what?”

He briefly catches Rust’s eye and settles back into his chair, one hand hooked around his neck. “I don’t know how good of an idea that’d be, Mace. I mean, you know we keep it civil nowadays, but she doesn’t need to do something like—oh. Okay.”

Rust watches Marty worry the inside of his cheek while Macie’s voice hums low on the other end of the line, reaching up to trace a fingertip around the rim of his mug.

“Well you know it means a lot, honey,” Marty says, blowing out a quiet sigh. “Appreciate you calling, but you’re—you’re sure she don’t mind? Yeah, let me talk to him and I’ll call you back.”

“You said you’re doing what?” He barks out a sharp laugh, grinning crookedly at Rust. “I’m sure. Uh-huh, yeah.”

The call ends and Rust flattens the newspaper back out on the table, shuffling the glossy ad fliers into a pile between them while Marty taps the phone against his chin. “What’s the word?” he asks, eyes flicking up from the lingerie advertisement settled square on top.

“Believe it or not,” Marty says, setting the phone down and leveling Rust with a look, “we’ve been invited to Christmas dinner at the Sawyer household, courtesy of an invitation extended by none other than my two lovely daughters.”

Rust makes a noise in the back of his throat and knocks back the last of his coffee. “How hard you think they twisted Maggie’s arm to pull that over?”

“Pretty fucking hard,” Marty sighs, running a palm over his head. “But Macie says she and Audrey want the both of us there—doing some kind of little gift exchange and everything, supposed to be some kind of joke. Maggie’s gonna bake a ham, apparently. Sounds like the real thing.”

“You sound less than thrilled.”

“I don’t know. It’s not my favorite play in the book considering we’d have to sit through a civil meal with Ted Sawyer, but it’d be nice, seeing the girls. And the baby.”

“Yeah,” Rust says, quiet, picking the newspaper back up. “Think about what you wanna do.”

Marty watches him for a moment and then reaches out to thump the back of the paper, popping it with his middle finger. “Let’s check this thing out today,” he says, waiting until Rust gets a look at the flea market ad taking up a quarter of the page. “Been wanting to find some shit for the girls anyhow—whatever it is they like. Old timey type-stuff, looks like it’s been through the fucking mill.”

“Antiques,” Rust says, blinking at Marty. “You want to go—antiquing?”

“If that’s the word,” Marty says, reaching out to turn the glossy lingerie advertisement around to get a better look at it. “Sure they’ve got a ton of shit right up your alley down there, too. Sell knives long as your arm for twelve bucks, probably a bunch of obscure books nobody’s ever fucking heard of.”

“You don’t gotta sell me on it,” Rust says, standing to carry their dishes to the sink. “Whatever you wanna do.”

Marty is still peering down at the underwear ad, getting a good look at the long-legged models splayed out across the page, bronzed to high heaven and dressed in nothing but little strips of lace and rhinestone-studded satin. He’s studying a pouting girl with honey-brown curls in a pair of low-slung lace panties when Rust walks back up with the coffee pot in one hand, topping off Marty’s cup with a stiff roll of his wrist.

“Thought you might be beyond looking at girls with their rosebuds airbrushed out of the fucking picture by now,” he says, turning to set the pot back in the maker. “That ain’t even good cheesecake.”

“What?” Marty asks, looking up with a start. “I’m not—” he says, and then swallows fast, smoothing out invisible creases in the paper with a low laugh. “Huh. You reckon you like the red or the black better?”

“The flea market opens at ten,” Rust says by way of answering, hitching up his sweatpants as he ambles out the kitchen. “Get ready and we’ll take the truck.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The sky looks ironclad to the touch and spits little gusts of rain for about twenty minutes before it relents—leaving the dirt parking lot cold and wet enough to be a minor hassle in terms of navigation for anybody with a bum knee and rubber-stopped walking stick—, but they make it inside in one piece and unzip their jackets, not too damp but still grateful for the little bit of warmth gathered between peddler stalls.

Rust strolls through the aisles with his hands planted in his pockets but there’s not much of anything his eyes don’t touch. He peruses tables of tanned leather belts and wallets, gaudy glass-set jewelry and finer southwestern sterling, endless boxes of ragtag books and records, a display case full of water bongs advertised as decorative table centerpieces, one booth dedicated entirely to secondhand silverware and then other random odds and ends scattered as far as anybody could hope to see. There’s a makeshift tattoo parlor set up in a plywood lean-to and a woman in a long purple skirt that moves like water around her legs, who asks to read his palm and—as he declines and walks away—tells him to not let the soul stray too far from the heart.

Marty’s resolve seems dialed up to twelve on a ten-point scale and he hones in on things for the girls with a glimmer of his old dogged tenacity put to new use, looking past hunting knives and turquoise-studded belt buckles branded with bygone years rodeo tours to ask blue-haired old women about their fine collection of pretties, as he put it. He charms them up nice n’ sweet until he closes out a deal on a crystal perfume atomizer inlaid with mother of pearl, followed up shortly by a good-sized walnut frame made up of finely carved ivy and garden flowers for no more than a fifty spot.

“They’re gonna love this shit,” he says when Rust wanders back with two paper cups of mulled cider, passing off one pillar of steaming warmth without comment. “Looks real classy, yeah? Thinking Audrey might even be able to put some of her work in the frame if she saw fit.”

“You on the hunt for anything else?” Rust asks, wedging the frame under one arm while Marty gathers up the boxed perfume bottle and hoists himself to his feet, both of them walking unhurried through the remaining stalls as they sip cider and listen to the occasional vendor hawk their wares.

“Not particularly,” Marty says, and promptly stops dead in his tracks, so sudden that Rust moves a few steps ahead before he can manage to put on the brakes. When he turns around and follows Marty’s line of sight he finds himself staring at a glass shelf stocked with a multitude of little porcelain pig figurines—pink, white, and spotted oinkers done up in a variety of costumes and poses, sunbathing in fold-out beach chairs, playing croquet, baking fruit pies with flour dusted over their snouts.

“There it fucking is,” Marty says, like he might be talking about a case-breaking piece of evidence or the holy goddamn grail, but no, he’s only staring clear and bright-eyed at a pale pink pig in a space suit, seemingly reaching out on tiptoe to pick a star from the sky.

Rust blinks at the figurines and then cuts his eyes back to Marty, flicking over his face. “There what is?”

“Maggie,” Marty says, clearing his throat and looking away. “Maggie used to collect these fucking things, guess from the time she was a little girl. Her great aunt would send her one every birthday until the year she died, same year Audrey was born.”

He looks back at the pig in the space suit with a funny look on his face, something Rust hasn’t seen enough of before or since to get a good handle on just yet. “She would always talk about wanting the space pig but she never could find it.”

“You gonna stand there and moon after it or make an offer?” Rust says, and then catches the attention of the vendor at the other side of the booth cluttered with pale china and figurines. “What’re you asking for these pigs, ma’am?”

The woman looks up from a book in her lap and squints at the shelf. “Come pretty cheap from an estate auction,” she says. “How much you wanna pay?”

“Rust,” Marty says quietly, giving a halfhearted little shake of his head. “I don’t think—listen, it probably ain’t my place anymore. She don’t want anything from me, and how fucking weird is it, buying your ex-wife shit in general, but then with your—with _you_ right here to boot.”

“Fuck all that, Marty,” Rust says. “How much?”

The astronaut pig sells for a whopping $12, and Marty goes through the exchange with two spots of color high in his cheeks that maybe don’t have anything to do with the cold, and as they walk away he leans in and mumbles, “A lowly drop in the bucket compared to what I got planned for you.”

“Dunno about that,” Rust says with a sliver of a smile, hitching Audrey’s frame up to rest against one hip as they move on down through the market. “Pretty hard to beat a ceramic pig in a space suit.”

“Boy,” Marty says a little weakly. “Don’t you even start.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


They wrap up in good time just after the fall of noon, and as soon as Marty finishes eyeballing a pair of toddler’s cowboy boots—“Maybe by the time she’s walking, get her started early,” he says—they start the long trek back to the truck, weaving back through booths and shouting kids, past the fortune teller who only smiles as she watches them go, past a toothless man peddling saltwater taffy and then, finally breaking out into the bitter cold, a milk crate padded with old towels sitting just outside the entryway, covered with a damp cardboard sign that reads _free 2 a gud home_.

Rust gives it a cursory glance as he passes and then stops, boots turning to follow the prints they’d just made in the dirt. There’s nobody keeping watch in sight, just a few scant pieces of litter and the milk crate jimmied up against the tin building, and it only takes a moment to lift the cardboard away and peer inside.

“What’re you doing?” Marty calls back from fifteen paces ahead, leaning hard into his cane. “I made it this far, can’t be stopping now unless you wanna carry me the rest of the way.”

“I’m coming,” Rust says, already back on the move, and once he gets Marty and their plunder piled up into the truck he stands in the driver’s side door with one hand hanging on the frame, squinting out across the dirt lot.

“Not that I don’t appreciate your solemn profile,” Marty says from across the bench seat, “but are you gonna get in here and crank up the heat or what?”

Rust leans in to turn the keys in the ignition and dials the heater up to full blast before he leans back out again. “I’ll be right back,” he says, and before Marty can open his mouth he’s jamming the door back into place and striking out with that stiff-legged saunter across the parking lot toward the market.

Five minutes later the rain has drummed back up into a steady drizzle, and Rust reappears from behind a line of cars with his palm pressed against the side of his coat but otherwise empty-handed. He swings easy back up into the truck and lowers the heat a little, bringing the sharp smell of cold rain in with him.

“Huh,” Marty grunts. “Could’ve just pissed in the wheel well. You got a shy bladder all a sudden?”

“Nope,” Rust says, and opens his jacket to reveal a tiny whiskered face peering out of the interior pocket, jet-black with eyes like pieces of green sea glass.

“Oh Christ,” Marty says, thunking his head back against the seat. “Where the hell did you find that? See, you go and do this softhearted shit and it’s like I can’t even argue with y—”

“She ain’t for keeping,” Rust says, scratching around the kitten’s ears with a fingertip. “Who do you know that’s been pining after one since October?”

Marty stares at him for a second before his mouth quirks up into a sly kind of smile. “Shit,” he says. “She’d come unglued.”

“Call her in to the office tomorrow morning,” Rust says, shifting down into drive and heading back toward the highway. “Guess this one’s gonna have to spend the night ‘til then.”  
  


  
* * *  
  
  


Christmas falls two days away on Wednesday but Shelley answers prompt like always, says it’s no problem, that she needed to pawn off some baking anyways and that she’d be in around noontime to help get the paperwork started on a hot case Marty said they’d just picked up.

She shows up five after twelve with a cookie tin and her laptop bag slung over one shoulder, auburn hair pinned up in plaits around her head, and narrows her eyes at Rust and Marty when she finds them sprawled out around Marty’s desk in plainclothes with coffee throwing steam into the air.

“Coulda told me it was casual Monday,” she snorts, kicking off her heels by the door before padding up to slide the cookie tin onto the desktop. She eyeballs the lack of paperwork and drops her laptop off her shoulder to hitch her hands up on her hips. “Thought y’all might’ve started without me. The way you were talking on the phone, this was going to be the case of the year.”

“That was a ploy to get you in here two days before Christmas,” Marty says, grinning up at her while he swivels lazily in his chair. “Turns out we got you something.”

He picks up an envelope and holds it out while Rust stands and pardons himself to walk out of the room. “Don’t open it just yet,” Marty says, watching Shelley turn it over in her hands. “Rust is gonna fetch the big gift for you to open first.”

“Martin Hart,” Shelley says, looking around the room like she might be trying to clock a hidden camera. “What have you two gone and done?”

“Might be something crazy,” Marty sighs, watching Rust come back down the hall through the office blinds. “I know it ain’t looked too fondly upon, doing this kind of thing without asking first, but we know you’ve been wanting one for a while—”

“Please,” Shelley laughs, though when Rust walks back in with a plain white box her eyes dart fast between them, gone a little wide and wary. “I didn’t see a new BMW with all the fixings in the parking lot when I came in, so you’d better stop cuttin’ up.”

“It’s a little smaller than that,” Rust says, placing the box on the edge of the desk before stepping back to drop down into his chair. “Go on and open it up, lid comes right off.”

Shelley steps up and places her hands tentatively on either side of the box, and as soon as she bridges contact a tiny little meow comes muffled from the inside.

“Oh my God,” she whispers hoarsely, pulling the lid up and away, and the moment she lays eyes on the tiny black kitten inside she sucks in a gust of air and dissolves into tears on the spot.

“L-look at this precious thing,” Shelley sobs, lifting the kitten out of the box and cuddling it up close under her chin. Fat tears are already running down her cheeks, and she laughs shyly through rattling breaths, embarrassed. “Y’all went and got me my own little b-baby.”

“You like her?” Marty asks, smiling and watching Shelley press a teary kiss against the top of the cat’s head. Rust’s eyes are cast down somewhere in his lap but the corners of his mouth curl up just enough to give him away.

“It’s a little girl?” Shelley says, sniffling and running a finger under the smudges of black under her eyes while the kitten mews and tips her head back to watch. “Of course I like her. I love her already, she’s the sweetest little thing, just look at her.”

She suddenly remembers the envelope—since dropped on the floor—and stoops to pick it up, keeping the kitten tucked in the crook of one arm while she jimmies it open and pulls the card out. The voucher inside for a nearby pet store brings on a fresh wave of crying so heavy she can barely manage to speak.

“Thought we’d, uh, go ahead and get you started,” Marty says, palming the back of his neck and exchanging a fleeting look with Rust over her shoulder. “Considering we just dumped a live critter on you and all.”

“Whose idea?” Shelley hiccups, gasping a little and looking between them. “Both of y’all are pure meanness, I can’t hardly believe it.”

Marty nods in Rust’s direction. “All Mr. Christmas over there.”

Shelley walks right to Rust and braces one hand on his shoulder, leaning down to press a light little kiss to his cheek that's maybe a little wetter than it might otherwise be. “Thank you,” she says, still sniffling. “She’s perfect.”

Rust clears his throat and nods, reaching out to rub two fingers over the kitten’s sleek fur before dropping his hand. “You think of any names?” he asks, pitched quiet.

Shelley only thinks for a handful of seconds before she reaches a decision. “Stella,” she says, turning to lean into Marty for a hug with the kitten pressed between them. “Little miss Stella.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“Wanna run up town real quick,” Rust says later that night, sitting down in the edge of the couch to start lacing his boots up. “You want to ride along?”

“Where to?” Marty asks, looking up from his laptop with his reading glasses low on the bridge of his nose. “It’s pushing nine-thirty.”

“You ain’t that old,” Rust half-snorts, still bent over tightening his laces. He finishes and rises to stand, palming the remote to click to the TV off. “C’mon,” he says. “It’ll be quick.”

Marty grumbles the whole time but gets his jacket pulled on and his feet jammed back in his boots, then throws a hat on, grabs his cane, and lets Rust herd him out the front door.

“What keys you got?” he asks while Rust locks up, zipping his coat up against the cold.

“Truck,” Rust says, leading the way, and Marty figures he doesn’t feel up to asking what or why.

Ten minutes later they’re pulling up in front of Jensen’s Liquors and Marty is leveling Rust with a dark look from across the cab. “You drug me out into this weather to fuck off at the liquor store?” he asks. “When we’ve got everything you could possibly want or need at the house.”

“We’re just parking here,” Rust says, stepping down onto the pavement and pushing his door shut, and then Marty looks over into the dirt lot next door and sees the Christmas trees.

There might be a moment where he has to blink a few too many times before he follows, but then he eases down out of the truck and catches up to Rust just outside the chain link fencing surrounding the trees. An older man is posted out front sitting vigil, taking a long drink straight from a thermos of something piping hot.

“Christmas Eve is tomorrow, boys,” he says as they walk up, screwing the lid back into place. “Hate to say it, but the pickings are pretty slim.”

“We’ll take a walk-through,” Rust says with a nod, and turns to peer back over at his shoulder with a pinch of moonlight shining like mischief in his eyes, and it’s so foreign there Marty hoots startled and reaches out to grab hold of him.

“You bastard,” he laughs as they walk through the meager sprawl of scraggly, lopsided trees. “I’d thought about it, but then it being just the two of us—I don’t know. Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that matters much anymore.”

“Course it matters, Marty,” Rust says, huffing out a cloud of breath. “Just a shame we can’t get our hands on a real one, these ain’t much of anything compared to the firs they got growing up in Alaska.” He leans to inspect the trunk of a sparse pine and then keeps moving down the line, nudging different candidates with the toe of his boot. “Pop and I used to cut and haul one back home every year, string it with popcorn and berries and shit. The deer’d have it picked clean in two days.”

They pass through two, three, and four rows of Christmas rejects before Rust stops near the back corner of the lot, stooping down to untangle a mess of branches until a squat three-footer is standing free, one side crooked and slightly mussed where it’d been pressed against the ground.

“What do you think?” he asks, shaking it out. “Fucked up and a little bent, but I reckon it’ll fit right in.”

Marty’s not even looking at the damn tree anymore, too busy watching a smile spread across Rust’s face as he fiddles with the branches before looking up to catch his eye, and in that moment it's not so hard to believe in something magic.

“Yeah,” Marty says, nodding a little and returning Rust’s grin in kind. “That looks like the one to me.”

   
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy [belated] Thanksgiving for those of y'all who celebrate it! Just let me take a moment to be sappy gross and reiterate how thankful I am for this show, this fandom, and all of you who continue to support this wild n' domestic ride of a story. It's been a good year for me in many respects, and I can chalk a whole lot of that up to finding _True Detective_ and this amazing community. So thank you again.  <3
> 
> This update turned into the beast that had to be reckoned with. I might've got a little long-winded in places and I'm sorry for that, but I hope everything makes a lot more sense in the long run. Next time we'll be looking at the three-part Christmas epic I have planned, so please bear with me until I wrap up and survive my winter finals. Much of what you see here was done in prep for that.
> 
> And while I've got your attention, let me go ahead and do a little advertising for my lovely beta, who published her own fic entitled ["Steering Wheel, Night Sky, Rust"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2608589) not too long ago. It's a bonafide and much-needed love letter dedicated to one Marty Hart and it will take you on the feel trip of your fucking life, so please go read if you haven't done so already.
> 
> I also recently wrote something myself that takes place outside this verse and stretches from '95 into 2012. If you want to check it out, you can find it here: ["into his hands"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2623919)
> 
> FINAL NOTE: The little bit about the Christmas tree at CID catching fire has been borrowed from inkandcayenne. The image has always been one of my favorites, and I couldn't resist paying homage :)


	27. glass stars

Rust opens his eyes to Marty lying next to him, the lines of his body blurred under the greyness of morning like water gone murky with mixed paints but soft to the touch. Marty’s curved on his side facing the wall, still breathing slow and easy, and Rust takes a moment to watch the blinds sway in the window under the lull of the ceiling fan, revealing a tiny sliver of the street outside where Christmas bulbs blink and burn like they’re guiding in the light of day.

He turns and presses his lips to the back of Marty’s neck once and again, gently tugging his shirt down to kiss the top knob of his spine and lower until the other man stirs and sighs awake, stretching and curling against him like an old warm dog.

Marty rolls around to settle on his back and cracks open an eye to look at Rust. There’s pillow creases trekking in pink lines across his left cheek and his old t-shirt is a little twisted around his neck, but his mouth pulls up into a sleepy smile, back of one hand ghosting against Rust’s stomach when it shifts under the sheets.

“Hey,” he murmurs, like maybe he needed something to soften the landing of the next two words. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” Rust answers, only vaguely wondering how many times he’s ever said those words strung together, letting the _s_ ’s whistle easy against the roof of his mouth. He twists around until his back pops and then slides toward the edge of the bed, slipping from soft cotton warmth into the cool morning air. “Gotta piss,” he mutters, standing and hitching his sweatpants up further on his hips, Marty suddenly watching him with a little more bright wakefulness in his eyes.

“Come back to bed when you’re done,” he says, yawning with one arm sweeping across the empty spot next to him. “Too damn early to be up on a holiday.”

Rust grunts out something in a promise and disappears down the hall, and as soon as he hears the bathroom door creak open Marty swings out of bed and goes to the closet despite the complaints of his stiff knee, hands carding through the folds of an old jean jacket. He fishes a box from the inner pocket and straightens the bow, then pads over to Rust’s side of the bed to set it gently on the edge of the nightstand.

As the toilet flushes and the faucet runs, Marty slides back into the warmth he’d abandoned a few moments before, pulling the sheet up and arranging it like he’d never left. He sighs as Rust retraces his steps down the hall and the air rushes out uneven, shaking a little at the tail-end of one long breath.

Rust comes in with a hand parting through his hair, still lean and narrow-hipped even with his gut pushed out to lead the way, and his eyes land on Marty before they drag right over to the box in one heavy sweep.

He sinks down on the edge of the bed with the long line of his back on display, shifting ribs belying the stretched span of seconds where it sounds like he doesn’t breathe. After a moment he reaches out and takes the box with careful fingers, and Marty can see him gently flip it over in one hand to look at the bottom before it disappears from view.

“Well,” Rust says a little hoarsely. He clears his throat as he pulls the bow loose, letting the silver ribbon pool on the nightstand before he swipes a thumb over the lid of the blue box. “I guess you went and got your hands on that nicer ribbon.”

Marty stays silent behind him as he opens the box, peeling back one thin fold of tissue paper and then another. Rust already knows what’s inside like he knows the sun will rise in the eastern sky, but the flash of gold makes his breath hitch anyhow, sagging deep and heavy in his lungs until it ebbs out and the air comes rushing back in like water.

He holds the plain yellow band between two fingers to look at it, presses it into the heel of his hand and then brings it up to his lips to let the cool gold rest against them. There is an indistinct urge to put it in his mouth, roll it over his tongue and suck the shine off like a piece of hard candy, but he pulls it down and away in exchange for a different kind of taste, something gathering up slow in the back of his throat.

Rust closes his eyes and thinks about the Marty he met almost twenty years ago, all heavy hip swagger and hair like a thatch of corn silk in the beating Cajun sun. Marty with finer lines pulling around his eyes while his life began to wither and plummet like dying leaves falling too fast to be caught, fists lashing out blind through the air until his knuckles made purchase on Rust and split wide. Marty alone in a limbo of his own creation while Rust himself spent the dead decade of one unending winter up in Alaska, both of them letting age grey their hair and lick weary ache into their bones. And then Marty coming back slowly and then all at once, new spring melting through the frost, tending something he planted in a room full of nothing but damp dark with Rust’s blood still shining wet on his hands.

Marty come and gone through the latter seasons of his life, walking through the desolation of a desert landscape and uprooting stones others had only ever left unturned, touching every nook and cranny of festering ugliness, every fault line, every fracture, every broken bone.

Marty holding his fucking insides in place with the warm weight of one hand and watching new pink skin slowly draw together around black-tracking stitches, and then bending, going down willingly without being asked, and leaning in to press his mouth against the curving scar because that was the easiest way of saying _I want you to_ _stay._

And maybe doubt left Rust long enough ago to feel futile anymore, but there’s a new kind of fear lurking where there wasn’t one before, and while he stares at the ring and wonders about falling—about wearing good things down like a lapping wave, about long car rides and cigarette-ruined upholstery and _Do you ever wonder if you’re a bad man?_ , about coming up short and failing the fourth person he’d ever managed to love—, maybe some of the same nerves have finally gnawed and eaten through Marty’s resolve behind him.

“I would’ve gotten down on one knee,” Marty says with a weak laugh, rasping through the words as he watches the pale smoothness of Rust’s back, “but then I probably wouldn’t have been able to get back up again.”

Rust opens his eyes and that voice cuts through the fear like piano wire through butter, wrings out the sour burning in the knot of his stomach and dilutes it with amber warmth, runs down through his arms and legs like wildflower honey still in the raw.

_Marty_ , he thinks, and that’s it. Marty, who had been both the final door and the first light coming up out of the dark.

“Always had you pegged for more of a traditionalist,” Rust says softly, because it’s all he can say, but he finally turns and folds himself back into bed, one long leg and then the other. He doesn’t look at Marty just yet, eyes cast down to study the shape held in the heart of his right hand. “But here you keep going and surprising me.”

“You don’t gotta wear it,” Marty says quick, reaching up to scratch through the whiskers along his jaw in a habit Rust had saved and filed away as _anxious_ sometime verging on twenty years ago. “I know it won’t really ever be anything more than a piece of jewelry, and you probably don’t take too much stock in the idea of it all, y’know, but I wanted—Jesus, I wanted you to have it anyway.”

Rust slides further across the bed until he can feel Marty’s breath coming soft against one shoulder and reaches down to take the other man’s hand, draws it up and holds it open between them. He drops the ring into the center of Marty’s palm and says, quietly, “Guess you should go ahead and put it on for me.”

He holds his left hand palm-up like an offering and Marty blinks before he takes it, tentative at first, like he’s reaching into a mirage, and turns it around in his own before sliding the band past the knuckle on Rust’s third finger.

“I hope it fits,” Marty says with a breathy kind of laugh, soft and pliant in the middle, the air around them tinged with something surreal. “Ain’t a ten karat diamond, but I guess it don’t look half bad.”

Rust leans back next to Marty so he’s wedged between their pillows along the center line of the bed, twists the band once and holds his hand up above them so the gold flashes lazy in the dull morning light. “No,” he says. “Not half bad.”

He turns into Marty in the next beat and presses a kiss to his mouth that isn’t rushed or fleeting, that doesn’t break even when he reaches up to rest one hand light on the side of Marty’s face, the cold in the metal already chased off by the warmth caught up between them.

“Jesus, Rust,” Marty breathes out and then Rust kisses him again, murmuring one time against the corner of his mouth, soft but unmistakable, “Thank you.”

But Marty’s grinning now, taken on that look like he’s about halfway ready to crow. “You haven’t even seen the other presents yet,” he says, cupping a hand around the back of Rust’s neck, thumb parting idly through the soft hair there. “Might take one look and decide you’re gonna leave me.”

“Doubt that,” Rust says, bowing over to press his lips to the pale, jagged gouge in Marty’s collarbone before dragging his mouth up to rasp over stubble and jawline, smiling a little at the way the other man sighs and hums underneath him. “But I reckon it can wait until later.”

The sun rises, and sometimes Rust likes to think it brings Marty with it.  
  


* * *  
  


Later, when they finally trail out into the living room, shower-damp and in search of coffee, the Christmas tree has been lit up in full.

Marty distinctly remembers pulling the cord out of the socket and killing the colorful strand of old-fashioned bulbs the night before, shooing the cat away from the tree stand and then straightening one of the little beer can creations Rust had fashioned and hung with a bent paperclip, and now he nearly trips on nothing but thin air at the sight of two plain white boxes tucked up underneath the crooked branches.

Rust doesn’t say a word from where he’s drifted off into the kitchen, merely cants a hip up against the counter and brings a steaming cup of coffee to his mouth, lazy eyes watching Marty over the rim of the mug.

“Huh,” Marty says with as much _you sly bastard_ as he can put into it, looking between Rust and the tree, and then turns on his heel to shuffle down the hall. He comes back with a zippered nylon bag and lays it next to the two white boxes, one long and the other short and square. It looks more like a flattened dead animal that had the misfortune of dying on the living room floor than any Christmas present, but he searches around for his phone anyways, trying not to smile too hard as he takes in their trailer trash lights and the ornaments courtesy of Lone Star and murmurs, “gonna need a fucking picture of this shit.”

“Got any guesses?” he asks when Rust walks into the living room and sets two mugs down on the coffee table. “One good one. Let’s hear it, detective.”

Rust’s eyes linger at the foot of the tree for a moment. “That’s a garment bag.”

“The trick of it,” Marty snorts, “is to guess what’s _inside_.”

“Knowing you, there ain’t no telling,” Rust says with more warmth than the words might otherwise suggest. He folds in on himself until he’s sitting cross-legged on the carpet, left hand reaching down to press a thumb into the sole of his right foot, and every time Marty sees the ring he has to blink and make sure it’s not a trick of the light.

“C’mon,” Rust says, skin faintly mottled with red and blue and green from the Christmas bulbs. “Want you to open one of yours first.”

Marty joins him on the floor without worrying about having to get back up again and tells himself there’s no reason to be bashful, not here in front of Rust, not now, but feels a warm flush start to crawl up his neck all the same.

“Which one first?” he asks, clearing his throat, and Rust only shrugs and tells him to pick. Marty takes the one closest and sets the small square box down in front of him, and when he looks up again Rust’s face isn’t giving anything away.

Marty pops the lid off the box and finds another inside, smooth black with embossed edges and a little metal hinge. He tips it out into his hand and cuts his eyes back to Rust, who finally quirks up an eyebrow as he absently picks at the ankle of his flannel pants.

“You gonna open it or make eyes at me all morning?” he asks.

“Both, probably,” Marty says, tracing his thumb along the seam of the box, the blush spread to his chest finally starting to fade and cool down. “Just sitting here still trying to figure you out, is all.”

“So open it and see,” Rust says, quiet, and Marty carefully unhinges the lid and does just that.

It’s a watch—more specifically, the one Marty’s been looking at in passing off and on for a good six months, brown leather with a dark blue face, ticking away by the count of fine gold hands. It’s a handsome piece of work, the kind of thing he’d never buy for himself without having to joke about taking out a loan first, and he knows damn well it cost Rust more than a pretty penny.

He gently pulls it from the case and hefts the weight in his hand, holds it up to the light to turn it this way and that. “Was gonna ask how you knew,” he says, and can’t help but beam while Rust watches him, “but then I don’t guess there’d be any real point.”

Rust doesn’t say anything but reaches out instead, taking the watch from Marty’s hands and undoing the strap. He settles it around the other man’s left wrist and threads the buckle back together, then takes his hand to turn it gently, letting the face catch and throw the light.

“You’ve got good taste,” he says, letting the pads of his fingers skim Marty’s palm as he pulls away. “Looks good.”

“Well,” Marty says, because that’s the easiest thing right now, and drags the black nylon bag around to settle between them. “I hope this here looks half as nice. Wasn’t anything you’d been looking at, I don’t think, so what’s in there is just pure intuition.”

“All right,” Rust says, looking at Marty with his head tilted a bit off to one side, and his mouth turns up a pinch as he reaches for the zipper and pauses. “I don’t reckon this is big enough for a wedding dress.”

“You fucking wish,” Marty tells him, laughing a little breathlessly, and watches as Rust tugs the zipper open.

His fingers part through the black sleeve and the smell hits them right off, a wave of mahogany-tinted warmth, smooth and rich, and Rust breathes it down deep before he pulls the jacket out. It’s soft brown leather, already supple and yielding, simply designed save for two side pockets and a silver zipper.

“Well shit,” he says, draping the jacket over one knee to smooth his hands over the leatherwork. “This is real nice, Marty.” He brings a sleeve up to finger the snap at the wrist, leaning in close enough for another smell that the tip of his nose almost skims the arm. “A lot softer than the one I had before.”

Marty remembers the smell of smoky leather, three holes punched clean through, Rust wild-eyed and sweating in front of him. “You like it?”

Rust nods once, voice soft and low. “I do.”

Marty feels a spike of warmth jolt through his stomach at that, a potent little shot of the thrilling kind of pride that has always come along with managing to please Rust, something he could sit and eat like candy if it were any easier to come by.

“Yeah,” he says, “I figured maybe you could use something like it—somethin’ nice, you know, outside that beat-up old canvas thing you insist on keeping around.” He laughs to himself and makes to get a knee up underneath him, nodding at Rust to do the same. “C’mon,” he says, pushing off the floor with a grunt. “Let’s see how it looks, considering I mostly snuck around trying to figure out the right size.”

Rust climbs to his feet and unhooks the zipper, but before he can swing one sleeve around Marty is stilling it in his hands and moving up close behind him.

“Here,” he says, clearing his throat, and gently takes the jacket to shake it open.

Rust’s head bows low but he pulls an arm up—his right shoulder still grooved with a deep ridge of fading pink—and slips it into the sleeve, one first and then the other. He lets Marty straighten the collar, not saying anything when two hands smooth over his shoulders before skimming down his back and falling away.

“Not bad,” Marty says, gaze laid out on Rust like blue on water, taking a step back while the other man turns round. “Sits good on your shoulders. Don’t recommend wearing it with flannel pants, but you’d clean up real nice.”

“You saying I don’t already?” Rust murmurs, peering down to snake his fingers into the pockets and touch the seaming on the hem. He cuts his eyes back up with a little smirk tugging on his mouth, eyes lazy-bright with his hair still falling damp against his forehead, and Marty wonders inside a briefly dizzying sort of moment how bad the rug burn would be if he threw him down and wore him out right there on the living room floor.

“Boy,” he breathes out, glancing at the white box still left unopened at their feet. “You’d better be glad I need to know what the hell that is.”

“Mmhmm,” Rust hums, stooping to pick it up with two hands. He passes it to Marty and then slides out of the leather jacket, draping it careful over the back of the recliner before dropping down on the couch. “Bring it over here,” he says, and clicks on the end table lamp. “Be able to see better in the light.”

“Don’t got my glasses,” Marty says, edging around Rust’s knees and the coffee table, and Rust shakes his head when he settles in next to him with the box.

“Don’t need them,” he says, running his hands down his thighs and looking elsewhere across the living room, the line of his throat bobbing slight.

That week of early mornings Rust spent out in the garage sparks along the edge of Marty’s memory when he looks down at the box—hoping to high heaven he hasn’t already given himself away, gone and ruined it all somehow—, but he still hasn’t got any real clue, probably couldn’t have guessed in twenty years knowing Rust, and when he lifts the lid off it turns out he was right.

The litter of broken glass from before has taken new shape, smoothed and formed into something more recognizable, and when Marty reaches out he touches a crescent moon made from a shard of broken mirror, almost a dozen stars carved out of yellow and blue, pink and green, the smallest of the bunch from that piece of cloudy white milk glass.

Everything is strung together and neatly knotted on clear fishing line, and Marty hooks a finger through the clasp looped near the top of the box, pulls up and lifts the moon and stars out halfway. They tinkle and jingle together faintly as they shift, and he knows, then, that they’re wind chimes.

“You made all these yourself?” Marty asks quietly, easing the glass back down in the box. “Each one with your own two hands.”

“Yeah,” Rust says, eyes still slanted down somewhere in the spread of Marty’s lap. He sighs deep, in and out, a move Marty knows he makes to prolong a pause when he’s working up to something. “Wind chimes—kind of a weird fucking thing, I guess, but I thought it’d be suiting.”

“Stars,” Marty says a little gruffly. “The moon and stars.”

“That’s our story,” Rust tells him, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. “The light and the dark, and I finally—I think I finally figured out, after coming up out of that place, what my light source was. Where it was coming from.”

“Jesus,” Marty breathes out, trying not to sound halfway wrecked. “Rust—”

“And the sky ain’t so easy to see down here, but I wanted you to have them all the same.” Rust laughs soft, one quick rush of broken air. “Least I could do, Marty, was try and give you the stars.”

Marty feels blind when he gets a handful of Rust’s shirt and leans into him, not even kissing him yet because he can’t, just holding their faces close together while they both sit slanted against one another, breathing quiet and easy.

“You like them?” Rust asks eventually, words warm against Marty’s neck, and he nods, letting his hand drop from the fabric of Rust’s flannel to settle around the curve of one hip.

“At this rate, you could give me a pile of horseshit and I’d probably be head over heels,” Marty says, and then laughs into the junction between Rust’s neck and shoulder before sitting back. “Of course I like them. Christ, Rust—I fucking love them.”

“I’ll save the shit for next year, then,” Rust says, and Marty reaches up to brace light fingers around his jaw. He turns the other man until he can lean in and find his mouth, kissing him soft with one hand cupped around his face, not too afraid anymore about what it means to be tender.

And there’s something to be said about all of it, the whole damn thing, but Marty doesn’t have the right words and Rust’s are too big and too many to pull together, so they meet in the middle where it’s familiar, where it’s quiet and safe, where two different shades of muted color can bleed into one another and make something a little more bright.  
  


* * *  
  


The wind chimes end up hanging from a beam on the back porch where they’re under the awning but can still dance in the paltry breeze, tacked up with a nail Marty insisted on hammering into the wood that morning.

Rust holds the stepladder steady with one hand and thinks about asking why Marty refused steadfast to put them out front somewhere, but then with the way the other man touches and looks at the colored stars—like they’re the real thing, still burning but fallen earthbound—he figures that’s all the answer he really needs.

They’re not due at Maggie’s until later in the afternoon, and it’s still an hour’s drive but they take their time with getting ready, piling up the girls’ presents by the door so Marty can try and check everything off, both of them ignoring the odd little bag or box that maybe wasn’t a part of the original lineup.

Rust is only halfway dressed in his undershirt and slacks, tucked up against the bathroom mirror and making quick but careful work of shaving when Marty leans in the doorway wearing a bonafide Christmas sweater, and he doesn’t quite drop his razor in the sink but it’s a near thing.

“You feeling festive?” is what he asks, eyeballing the gaudy white pattern knit into the red wool.

“What, you don’t like it?” Marty asks, looking down to pluck along the hemline. “Shame, considering I got you a green one just like it, ‘cept yours has little white pom-poms all down the front.” He glances up, expression drawn a little wistful. “Was thinking we could’ve matched.”

Rust catches his eye in the mirror, gone stone-still, half his face still lathered up in white foam. The shower stop on the tub faucet finally falls and neither one of them move when it spits out a few residual mouthfuls of water that piss down the drain.

Marty arches an eyebrow and tries to keep a straight face but it doesn’t last, eyes crinkling up as he barks out a laugh that echoes loud off the tile. “Nah,” he says, still laughing weakly while Rust watches him, “but you should have seen your face, holy shit, plumb near struck me dead.” He leans into the space between them and smacks a big kiss against the clean-shaven side of Rust’s jaw, ends up coming away with a smudge of white on his chin.

“Ain’t you a sweetheart, though, not saying anything right off,” he laughs, and only has time to holler once in surprise before Rust grabs him and kisses him full on the mouth, smearing half the shaving cream off his face onto Marty’s.

The red Christmas sweater ends up a civilian casualty of the war when Rust slaps a wet handprint against it, but Marty doesn’t grumble too much, only tosses it in the dryer for a quick spin and tells Rust if it shrinks, it was getting too damn big anyhow.

Rust buttons up into a soft grey shirt and watches Marty comb his hair for maybe the third time in front of the mirror before he peers down to spin the crown on his new watch. He’s had to start doing up his belt a notch or two tighter, having spent most weeknights after work out in the garage on that exercise bike. His knee still gives him enough trouble to keep the cane handy when he leaves the house but he’s doing better, all things considered, and as the weeks tick by Rust can feel the lines of his body beginning to change and shift under his hands.

Before they load up into the car, Rust reaches for the leather jacket and slips it on, feeling Marty’s eyes laying heavy on him from where he’s standing by the door.

“You ready there, slick?” he asks, cane hanging on one elbow with his hands full of boxes and bags, and Rust stoops to pick up the last few gifts before letting Marty usher him out front into the cold.

The day is bright despite the heavy chill hanging in the air, and he watches his own hands as he tucks Christmas away in the trunk, thinking briefly about mentioning something to the effect of Maggie’s sharp eye before deciding against it. The ring stills sits where Marty placed it that morning, already beginning to feel more familiar than foreign, and Rust figures that might as well be where he keeps it.  
  


* * *  
  


The Cadillac noses onto Bartholomew Street at half past three, and the Sawyer house is just as big and pretty and white as Marty remembers, only now all done up for Christmas with evergreen spiraled around the front columns and wreaths the size of truck tires hanging on the double oak doors.

“Pretty fuckin’ fancy,” Rust says, squinting out the windshield, and Marty laughs quiet under his breath.

“Wait until you see the inside,” he says as they turn into the driveway behind Orren’s car. “Looks like something out of one of them home decor magazines.” He shifts into park and clears his throat, pulling the keys out of the ignition. “But she’s done—she’s done real good for herself, I guess. So that’s good. Y’know.”

“Yeah,” Rust says, popping his door open and stepping out. “Never said it wasn’t.”

They leave the presents in the car for the time being and trail up the front walk, past the manicured shrubbery and the white wicker reindeer, the heavy planter urns and the vigilant little gargoyle statue that seems to follow them from its perch at the foot of the portico stairs.

Marty rings the bell and the sound of it echoes throughout the house like a few notes on a pipe organ, and he tries not to catch Rust’s eye but does anyways, cracking a manic sort of grin just as the front door swings open and Macie peeks out with the baby on her hip.

“Dad, Rust—Merry Christmas!” she says, pulling the door open wider with a dimpled smile. “We were wondering when you were gonna get here.”

Lilah blinks wide-eyed at them for a moment and then squeals, kicking her feet so her little plaid Christmas dress ruffles up around her legs. The squeal tapers off but she keeps babbling and brings one hand up to her mouth, eyes honed in serious on Marty’s red sweater.

“Hey darlin’,” Marty says, leaning in to kiss Macie on the cheek before stooping down a little to grin at the baby. “Here’s Miss Lilah, already growing like a weed and scaring me half to death. Is somebody excited to see Grandpa and Poppy for Christmas?”

She hums between her lips and kicks one foot again and Rust can’t help but smile, marveling a bit at how much she’d managed to grow in the month since he and Marty last saw her. Macie leads them into the big white foyer and the smell of Christmas hits him like a wave, a mingling potpourri of baked ham and potatoes, something strong and heady and green, a hint of spice and one tiny thread of warm vanilla.

“Nice jacket,” Macie says, making an appreciative face in Rust’s direction, and he reaches up to finger the zipper pull under the weight of her gaze, eyes the same shape and blue as Maggie’s.

“Thanks,” he murmurs, looking down at it, and feels two familiar hands rest around his upper arms before sliding up, warm fingers curling down below the neckline. “Your—your dad gave it to me.”

Marty helps slide the jacket off his shoulders and Rust lets him, not quite able to shake off Macie’s line of sight when another voice precedes its owner walking into the room.

“Heyo, looking pretty good there, Marty,” Ted Sawyer says, strolling in wearing a plaid sweater vest and bright-white smile, just in time to catch Rust pull his hand free from the brown leather. “And Mr. Cohle, did you just walk off the cover of GQ? Looking sharp.”

“Howdy Ted,” Marty says with an odd little slant to his voice, hanging the jacket up on the stand by the door. “Y’all have done up the place real nice for the holidays.”

“Oh yeah, Maggie tends to get a little crazy with the decorations,” Ted says, looking around the room like he’s seeing them for the first time, and then points from his hip up at a Christmas angel with glass wings sitting on display in the dining room. “Brought that one back with us from Italy in 2009. All hand-blown glass, had to be packed up like King Tut to get it home on the damn airplane.”

Marty walks up next to Rust so their shoulders brush and spares the angel a cursory glance. “Huh,” he says, jingling the keys in his pocket. “Rust made our tree topper out of a beer can.”

“Is that your father and Rust?” Maggie’s voice is calling out from somewhere in the house, and they know she’s coming before they see her, heralded in by heavy-heeled steps clacking along the hardwood floor. She slips around the corner wearing an apron over a long-sleeved dress rolled up around her elbows, hair clipped back at the nape of her neck, and smiles enough that it reaches her eyes when she sees them.

“Thought that’s who I heard,” she says, though she stops short in the archway and doesn’t step any further into the foyer. Her eyes flick between Rust and Marty like two pages of a book, lips slightly turned up into a little bow. “And don’t you both look nice? Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” Marty echoes, and Maggie blinks at them before she turns, making a graceful sort of gesture with one hand that makes the silver bracelet around her wrist glitter in the light.

“I’ve got glazed carrots still going on the stove,” she says. “Dinner’s getting there, just a few more minutes—you all can sit down in the living room, Audrey and Orren are in there trying to put something together for the baby.”

And that’s how Rust ends up cross-legged on Maggie Sawyer’s living room carpet with a screwdriver in one hand, taking the odd direction from Orren reading off a tissue-thin set of instructions while Marty and Ted do soft combat on the outlook of next season’s round of college football, set up in opposing armchairs like generals waging over a rising battle.

Macie has wandered off to help in the kitchen and Audrey sits on the floor leaned up against the loveseat with the baby in her lap, holding open some kind of toy that flashes and sings every time a Lilah smacks a hand against it. Her hair is twisted up in a braid thrown over one shoulder, shoes kicked off so the toes of her black stockings occasionally press into the pale sliver of skin at Orren’s back whenever his shirt happens to ride up.

She watches them work but doesn’t say much outside the occasional coo to the baby or a suggestion for getting the little push-car put together, and the moment Orren gets up and walks across the room to ask Ted about a wrench, Rust can feel her focus dial in on him like a deer caught in the crosshairs.

“So,” Audrey says, playing something akin to patty-cake with Lilah without really watching, eyes lightly trailing over the side of Rust’s face. “This is me pointedly not saying anything about that ring on your left hand.”

Rust looks up at her, unhurried, not once faltering on the steering wheel he’s been attaching to the car. Marty’s eyes look back at him, longer-lashed and lined with soft brown, but the familiar brightness there is the same shade of good humor he’s used to. He looks down again and picks up another screw. “This is me pointedly not asking you to maybe not say anything to your mama just yet.”

“Oh believe me,” Audrey says, laughing soft, “I was planning on leaving that up to you.” She cuts her eyes over to Marty, still in a mounting debate with Ted, and lowers her voice by a fraction. “You know, it’s really kind of fucking weird, Rust, but then it’s not? Like you two just— _fit_.”

“Fucking weird,” Rust repeats, with a little smile curving up the corner of his mouth. “Sounds about right.”

Lilah has found the end of Audrey’s braid and keeps trying to put it in her mouth without much success. “I don’t mean it like that,” Audrey says, picking up a plastic pony off the floor to hold in front of the baby. “I’m happy for you, the both of you, but just thinking about my dad and what happened between you and him—whatever that was, I sure as hell wasn’t paying attention at the time. It’s—I don’t know. I’m just surprised, I guess, by everything. Like he’s…”

She can’t seem to grab hold of the word in the air, and Rust clears his throat. “Changed?”

“Changed,” Audrey says with a sigh, settling back further against the couch. “Jesus, I guess that’d be an understatement.”

They watch one another for a moment and then she’s smiling easy, breaking into the quiet and tipping her head back toward Marty. “Dad too shy to wear his?”

The screwdriver stalls out in Rust’s hands, dropping down to rest against his thighs. “He doesn’t have one,” he says, thumbing against a crease in his pants that won’t level out. “He, uh—he only gave it to me this morning.”

“A Christmas proposal,” Audrey says with a quiet little snort, smoothing down some hair on Lilah’s head. “Yeah, that sounds about like Martin Hart.”

“Come and get it!” Macie calls out from the entryway, flagging Ted and Marty down over the hum of the television. “Everything’s hot on the table, mom says hurry up and get in here, she didn’t slave all day for nothing.”

“Everybody be casual,” Audrey murmurs low, hitching the baby up on one hip before she takes the hand Rust extends to help her stand. “Thankfully Miss Lilah here is pretty good at keeping secrets.”

She stays close to him for a moment and doesn’t let his hand go, holding it between them so she can get a closer look at the ring. Her fingers are fine and pale, almost like porcelain where they rest against his skin, and he’s left to blink at the top of her bowed head.

“Changed,” Audrey says one more time, gently lowering Rust’s hand and taking a step back to peer up at him. “Do you know how much of that was for you?”

Rust can’t quite look at her. “Audrey—”

“It’s okay,” she says, smiling soft and a little sad. “I’m just glad you came back along when you did.”  
  


* * *  
  


Maggie takes one head of the table with Ted amiably settled at her right and insists on Orren taking the other, who stammers and tries to decline but ends up there anyways when Audrey gets two fingers through his belt loop and tugs him down into the chair. They set the baby up in her high chair between them, Macie takes the chair on Maggie’s left, and Rust ends up in the seat between her and Marty when the latter pulls it out for him before he can reach it himself.

He sits, and tries not to think it a small miracle that the chair across from him is empty.

The spread Maggie put out is impressive, though, with the table done up like one big collage using pictures cut from high-gloss magazines, and Marty manages to comment on the cooking no less than three times throughout dinner—the ham, the scalloped potatoes and the crescent rolls, which Maggie snorts into her glass when he mentions and tells him, “Thanks, they came fresh from a tube I picked up at the grocery store.”

Conversation rides a fine line between politely forced and humbly awkward, and then three glasses of wine into dinner Ted starts asking why they haven’t all gotten together like this more often. Maggie’s gone a tad pink in the cheeks herself and laughs a little too loud at that, throwing her gaze down Rust and Marty’s way with a funny sort of look on her face.

“Do you remember,” she starts in, and Rust wonders in that moment if anybody but he and Marty and Maggie know, if anybody else will ever know how it all went down, and then she says, “Do you remember that first dinner we had way back when? When you brought me those flowers, Rust.”

Rust blinks and Marty sets his glass down on the tablecloth with a dull thud, both of them watching her until Rust says, quietly, “Yes.”

“I think about that sometimes,” Maggie says, sinking against the back of her chair, suddenly gone a little more sober. Her mouth works for a second like it’s on a loose hinge while she touches an unused dessert fork with one finger. “And now—well, here we are.”

“Here we are,” Rust repeats, watching her, feeling Marty’s hand brush his knee under the table, come and gone like a passing bird.

“I’ll drink to that,” Ted says abruptly, knocking back the last mouthful in his glass, and on that note dinner’s over.

Dessert is two kinds of pie fresh from an Italian bakery and a tin of kiss thumbprint cookies Macie brought with her. Rust hands his slice of pie off to Marty, breaks the edges of a cookie away one at a time and leaves the chocolate center abandoned on his napkin.

“You’re giving up the best part,” Marty laments, and then watches as Rust places it on the edge of his plate before swiping one finger through the dollop of whipped cream on Marty’s piece of pecan, bringing it up to his mouth to lick the sweetness away.

“Kiss for your thoughts,” he says, and when he looks back up the whole table is watching them.

Marty only grins halfway devilish at Rust, picks the chocolate up and pops it right into his mouth.  
  
  


* * *  
  


Rust stands in the hallway outside the front room with his eyes moving over the mural of family photos stretched across the wall, momentarily caught there on his way back from the bathroom, drawn in by the pull of foreign memory.

There’s a nice spread of Macie and about half as many of Audrey inside the ten-year gap he didn’t know them. The former is in good company with friends and her crooked dimples and a framed diploma, the latter mostly with colder eyes and in various stages of preparing to flick off the camera, though she offers up the first genuine smile in a photo of her and Orren caught off guard at a gallery showing, standing in front of colossal canvas painted with spring flowers. Maggie and Ted pose together on their wedding day and then in front of the Louvre, the Coliseum, the Grand Canyon, the fucking Bellagio in Vegas, grinning and squinting in the sunlight. There are one or two new photos of the baby on the day she was born and in a little sun bonnet that looks handmade, and then in a collage frame made up of shots taken from Audrey and Orren’s wedding there is—small, each of their faces smaller than his fingertip, not even fully looking at the camera—a photo of him and Marty.

They’re standing off to one side each holding a glass of champagne, and Rust can’t remember the camera flash, can’t remember what the hell it was they were doing through the blur of smudged memory, but he’s smiling—caught mid-sentence, lips parted just enough to show off a ridge of white teeth, gaze cut low toward the floor. And Marty’s there, eyes only for one person in the room, watching him like he’s every good thing in the world, face lit up fit to the rival the fucking sun.

“Rust!” Marty’s calling out here and now, and Rust blinks out of the photograph, jerks back a step to find the thread of sound. “Shit, come here for a second—hurry up!”

Maggie and the girls are still arranging presents under the tree, Orren has the baby and a bottle in hand, Ted’s gone and disappeared up the stairs to search out the video camera, and Rust is walking fast across the house—not running, not running, but moving at a good clip, clear-headed and alert, and when he rounds into the kitchen Marty’s leaning on his cane in the doorway of the sunroom, not doing anything but watching the other man swoop in like he’s half-ready to swan dive into a fight.

Rust slows down but burns through the space between then until he’s right up under the archway with Marty, scanning over his hands, his face, his bad leg. “The fuck you call me in here for?” he asks, and Marty clears his throat a little before he looks up above their heads.

Rust follows his line of sight and then growls out a laugh, low and rasping in the back of this throat. “You motherfucker.”

“Now how’d that get there?” Marty asks, smiling innocent as he hooks his cane around one elbow. “Didn’t see it hanging up before.”

“You know that shit’s a parasite?” Rust says, dropping his eyes away from the sprig of mistletoe to slant a look at Marty. “Takes root in a host and lives off the photosynthetic contributions of other plants.”

“If you thought your highfalutin science talk was gonna sway me, you got another thing coming,” Marty says, and gets his hands around Rust’s waist to lean in close and kiss him.

And Marty was never any slouch of a kisser but this one makes something in Rust’s stomach honest-to-God flutter and he tips headlong into it, braces his hands up around Marty’s ribcage and holds on as the other man licks hot into the seam of his mouth. Their noses brush and bump together and Rust makes a little sound, one little hitch in his throat that’s got Marty’s hands coming up to press against the small of his back, pulling their hips flush together while paling afternoon light stripes across their clothes between the window blinds.

The kiss deepens before it breaks and then they’re both left swaying against one another, dizzy and a little breathless, pressed up tight in the doorway of Maggie’s cream and sunflower-decorated sunroom. Somebody’s been calling him and Marty from the front of the house but Rust can’t be bothered to hear them, at least not just yet.

“Did you ever think in a million fucking years,” Marty murmurs, one hand heavy around Rust’s hip, “that I’d be plantin’ one on you in my ex-wife’s big fancy house on Christmas Day?”

“Hell no,” Rust says, and finds Marty’s mouth again.  
  


* * *  
  


They leave the dinner carnage to settle for a bit in lieu of presents, and Rust sits tucked in the furthest corner by the window, looking up at the pre-lit twelve footer nearly scraping the vaulted ceiling. It’s done up with maroon and gold tinsel, glitter-dusted glass bulbs, the occasional handmade ornament from the girls and any odd thing Maggie’d managed to collect over the years. On one branch near his head there sits a lifelike morpho butterfly, light and finely brittle, and when he gives in to temptation and reaches out to touch it—one fingertip along the edge of a black and cobalt wing—, he’s surprised to find that it’s real.

“I didn’t kill it,” Maggie says, and Rust looks up to where she’s dropping down on the ottoman a few feet away. “Found it like that in the yard probably twenty years ago, just sitting there in the grass.”

Rust looks back at the butterfly, preserved in time, still just as striking and blue as a live one. “Why do you put it on the tree?”

Maggie shrugs one shoulder and dips her head into it a little, a gesture that reads like an echo from a past life, more suited to dryer-spun cotton and denim shorts than her tailored dress. “It’s beautiful,” she says. “Something lovely even in death. I didn’t want to throw it away.”

Marty comes back from the bathroom and looks between them before settling on the floor next to Rust’s knee with some minor ado, propped against the side of the chair. His cane has been given an impromptu seasonal makeover, wrapped with a spiral of gold tinsel that’s been knotted up in a bow around the handle.

“What happened to your cane?” Rust asks, and Marty tries to sound put-off but a smile thrums clear through his voice anyhow.

“Oh, I got a couple ideas,” he says. “Most of them Macie.”

“You want the seat?” Rust murmurs, gently nudging his shoulder, and Marty shakes his head.

“I’ve already gotten down here now,” he says, watching Orren come back in with the baby asleep in one arm, shortly followed by the girls carrying a big box between them. “Just be prepared to help me back up later.”

Ted finally trails back in with the camcorder in hand, swinging it around to get a glimpse of everybody through the display window. “Y’all ready?” he asks with a lilting drawl tacked onto to his voice, settling down next to Maggie. “Be on your best behavior, else I’m uploading you to YouTube.”

Rust feels Marty squeeze the back of his calf and bends closer to hear him. “Try and flick off that fucking camera on the sly as many times as you can,” Marty murmurs against his ear, and then turns and coughs light, raising his voice. “Jesus,” he says, watching the girls set the box down. “Who’s that big one for?”

“You and Rust,” Macie says, clapping her hands against her thighs. “One big haul from me and Audrey and Orren. You wanna open it now?”

“Oh, well,” Marty says, idly pulling at the neck of his sweater. “I mean, I guess—I guess we can, if you want us to go first.” He tips his head back next to Rust’s knee to peer up at him with a crooked sort of grin. “You wanna?”

“That’s fine,” Rust says, quiet, and then tries not to think about the last time he actually sat and pulled the wrapping off a present, tipping the box up for Marty to rip the rest of the paper away. Between the two of them, they make out with a Keurig coffee brewer—(“Look here,” Marty says, tossing a salted caramel flavor cup back into Rust’s lap. “This thing’s fixing to be your new best friend.”)—, a throw blanket that looks and feels like wild rabbit fur, some kind of e-reader device, a leather-bound journal that Marty wordlessly passes off to Rust with a knowing kind of smile, and one generous gift card to a brewery restaurant on the outskirts of Lafayette, courtesy of _the Sawyers_ written in Maggie’s looping script.

Marty provides enough obligatory commentary for the both of them and Rust’s thankful for that, keeps his hands in his lap and lets Marty take the lead even though he palms what is passed to him and smiles genuine enough when he does it. The rest of the room slowly divides and conquers the remaining gift pile and Rust watches their hands, their faces, the little mannerisms that pull at their mouths and around their eyes depending on the person and the present. Marty doesn’t end up making any veiled attempts to flip the bird at Ted’s camcorder, and it’s not until halfway through that Rust looks down and realizes he’s been parting his fingers through the soft blanket the whole time, twisting one corner between his hands.

And maybe Marty notices, too, because he’s got a hand resting around Rust’s ankle, not doing anything more than keeping a light pressure there, occasionally squeezing when he leans forward or laughs.

The girls seem taken with their gifts and Marty’s downright chuffed at that, tapping into some kind of punch-drunk Christmas buzz, and only when Maggie picks up a familiar box with her name on it does he go a bit quiet, shoulder pressed rigid against Rust’s thigh.

“Who’s this from?” she asks, sliding a thumbnail under a corner of the wrapping paper, though she doesn’t wait for an answer before pulling out the box and popping the lid open.

“Me, uh—me and Rust, I guess,” Marty says, sliding a hand up to palm the back of his neck. “Just something we found a while back—don’t know if you still keep them or not…” His smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes as he claps a hand against his thigh. “But hey.”

Maggie’s eyes narrow a little at them, but when the bubble wrap and tape gives way she’s left staring at the ceramic figurine in her lap, nestled along the seam of her legs.

“What on earth is that?” Ted asks, swerving the camera around to focus on her lap. “Porky Pig in a space suit?”

Maggie tucks a few loose waves of hair behind her ears and laughs, the sound of it a little coarse in her throat. “The only one I couldn’t find,” she says, touching the tiny yellow star at the tip of the pig’s hoof. She shakes her head but doesn’t look up. “Where did you even get this?”

“Flea market off Route 90, believe it or not,” Marty says, and Maggie nods, throwing him a fleeting tight-lipped smile.

“Thank you,” she says, and then shifts back into something else, telling Macie to open the present that came in the mail from her grandparents, and then to not forget about _calling and thanking them for it this time, Macie, you know how nana gets._

She doesn’t put the pig back in the box until the last present is opened, and then carefully slips it away, standing and excusing herself to go start in on cleaning the kitchen.

“Where’re you going, mom?” Macie asks, catching Maggie’s knee with her foot. “We’re not done yet.”

“What—?” Maggie asks, and then her expression deadens and falls flat. “God, Macie, do we really have to make a big production out of that? I thought you were kidding.”

“Nope!” Macie says, springing up off the couch and padding out of the room. “Sit back down for just a second, it’s gonna be fun. Maybe a whole new tradition.”

She totes back in a box full of smaller boxes and bags and sits down with it in the middle of the floor, rubbing her hands together. “Gag gift time,” she announces, and reaches down to root around in the box, tongue caught between her teeth. “Let’s see who’s first.”

Audrey turns bright pink when she pulls out a bottle of edible body paint, and Orren laughs until he opens the lid on his box and shuts it again real fast, giving Audrey a wide-eyed look. “Your parents are here,” he hisses, mortified, shoving the box between them on the couch with a nervous laugh. “And I’m holding the baby.”

“How do you think we got that baby?” Audrey snorts, and Orren promptly clears his throat and calls out for the next person to take their turn.

Macie crosses herself before she rips open the package Raleigh sent along from his grandmother’s house in Holland and then pulls out a schoolgirl outfit made up of thigh-highs and a pleated skirt and not much else. Ted ends up with a red dog collar, tags and all, and actually clips it on around his collared shirt like a bowtie.

“What Maggie here doesn’t know is that I’ve actually been wanting one of these,” he says, squeezing her side a little and making her jump as she takes the small gift bag Macie passes up from the floor.

“An electric toothbrush and AA batteries,” Maggie says after she pulls the tissue paper away. She blinks at both in her hands, sagging a little in something akin to relief. “Just…what I needed, actually.”

“Yeah,” Ted says, laughing against her shoulder, dog tags jingling. “I thought maybe you could use it when I’m out of town on business trips.”

Marty coughs loud and sudden like he’d sucked a lungful of water down the wrong pipe, slapping a hand over his mouth before it’s too late. His shoulders shake for a moment and then he draws his hand up to scratch through one eyebrow, brought back to composure in the span of about two seconds. “Sorry,” he says a little weakly, and giggles again when Rust nudges his leg with the toe of his shoe.

“All right then,” Maggie announces a little loudly, setting the package aside and throwing Ted a look that neither Rust nor Marty can see, but which makes the other man flash a randy sort of grin at her all the same. “Your dad and Rust’s turn, let’s go.”

Marty’s on edge now, drumming his fingers against the carpet, not quite meeting Macie’s eye when she underhand tosses him a small rectangular box about the size of his palm. It’s pretty hefty for its size, wrapped in plain brown paper and a tag scrawled over with _Marty_ in Rust’s familiar hand.

“What is this, a block of C-4?” he asks, popping Rust on the side of the leg. “I’m scared to open it.”

“Not quite C-4, but it’s flammable,” Rust says, and Marty doesn’t know what he’s expecting when he rips the paper away and sees a familiar old Avon label staring back at him.

“Black Suede?” he laughs, pulling the cologne bottle out of the box. “Jesus, I used to love this shit—I haven’t worn it since…” he trails off, throat working a little, seam between his eyebrows drawn tight. “Well, roundabout ’96 or ’97. Somewhere in there.”

He turns and doesn’t quite look at the other man, bypassing the question hanging heavy between them to ask a different one. “How’s this a gag gift, you reckon?”

Rust thumbs along the side of his nose, looking down at the bottle in Marty’s hands. “Guess it ain’t, but I wanted to get something you’d be bound to use.” He clears his throat and stares at some high point on the wall. “Don’t hurt that I don’t mind the way it smells, either.”

“Oh, Lord,” Marty mutters under his breath, eyes fallen shut, and when he opens them again he catches sight of Macie rustling around for the last present in the box. She leans in to hand it to Rust and the muscle in Marty’s jaw hops once, eyes gone a little wild.

“Rust, maybe you should open it later,” he says, swallowing dry. “Not—right now.”

“What?” Macie squawks. “You can’t do that, dad, we all opened ours!”

“Listen—,” Marty starts in, but Rust has already gotten his finger up under the tape and is popping the lid free, and now Macie’s hollering from the floor, _“Open it, Rust, open it up!”_

The tissue paper rustles and Marty knows it’s over, can’t even watch, only brings his hands up to his burning face and asks himself how the fuck he ever thought this would be a good idea.

Rust holds a pair of red panties up by the tip of one finger, looking at the delicate lace with his lips parted, blinking a few times like he’s wading back through a deeper thought.

“Might be a little tight, Marty,” he finally drawls, and Marty nearly jumps clean out of his skin when he feels the lace brush along the back of his neck. “Do like the red, though.”

“You should model them around for us, Rust,” Orren says, snorting even as Audrey whacks him on the arm, and when Marty looks up he can’t quite register any of the other faces in the room.

“Maybe some other time,” Rust says, dropping the panties back into their box, and Maggie clears her throat and takes that as her cue to disperse the festivities.

“Macie, this is a tradition you can keep between you and your friends from here on out.” She smoothes her hands over her dress and stands, rising with an air of finality. “One time is enough, I think. I’ll be in the kitchen.”

“Well,” Macie says as Maggie walks out, raking a hand through her hair with a sigh. “I was hoping we weren’t all a bunch of freaks, but I guess I stand corrected.”

“Please, Rust gave dad a bottle of cologne,” Audrey says from the couch. “Tamest thing all night.”

Macie throws Rust a look over her father’s shoulder. “How’s it feel,” she asks, “being the most well-adjusted person here?”

By all means, nobody’s really expecting it when Rust throws his head back and laughs.  
  


* * *  
  


When Marty’s busy playing with Lilah on the living room floor with everybody else piled up in front of the TV, Rust slips out and makes a quick stop by the front door, then finds himself wandering back into the kitchen where Maggie’s pulling her apron off a hook by the pantry and slipping it over her head.

“You need any help?” he asks, watching her knot a bow at her back, and she gives him an odd sort of look before turning to thumb on the coffee maker.

“If you want,” she says, nodding toward the sink. “I’ll get the water going, you can start bringing in dishes.”

Rust makes quick work of rolling his sleeves up over his forearms and totes in dishes from the dining room, stacking them up by the sink while Maggie’s hands disappear into the suds rising in the water. She doesn’t make a habit of watching him come and go, but their shoulders brush once and again, and right when he catches her on the cusp of an inhale she’s looking up and asking, “When did you stop smoking?”

“Don’t know if I ever fully quit,” Rust says, raking table scraps into a bowl full of eggshells and kitchen waste with the edge of a butter knife. “But I tried to make an effort after—after the baby came along, you know. She don’t need to be around it.”

Maggie nods roughly to herself and throws her back into scrubbing out a casserole pan. “It amazes me,” she says, dropping the pan to look up and accept a heavy glass dish from Rust, “how much you and Marty have tightened up in the past year or so. To the point where sometimes I’ve got to sit and wonder what—”

Her voice cuts out abruptly, shorn off midair, and she backs away from the sink with the dish still in her hands, dripping sudsy water in a steady stream around her feet. Rust can see her from the corner of his eye, can feel her line of sight, and knows if he could reach out and touch it the thread would be knotted tight around the third finger of his left hand.

The faucet is still running and Rust turns to look at her, slow, like maybe the slower he moves, the slower all this will ignite and combust.

“Maggie,” he tries to say, and then the dish drops to the tile floor, bursting into a thousand tiny pieces with a sound that goes off like a gunshot.

“What is that?” she says, calm, and there’s glass on the tops of her feet and glittering around the ankles of Rust’s pants but she can’t be bothered to notice it now. Her eyes burn along the edge of his jaw like blue-hot corrosive and Rust knows there’s no use in trying to meet them, only stands there and wonders if he’ll be able to ever again.

“What is that, Rust?” she repeats, loud enough that it echoes off the high ceilings, and he takes a step back, shoes crunching through broken glass.

“You’re not stupid, Maggie,” Rust says, so low the running water almost drowns his voice out. “You know what it is.”

“Do I really?” she asks, and then Ted is loping into the kitchen with Marty nearly skidding in behind him a moment later, both of them blinking and a little winded.

“What in the hell happened?” Ted says, walking around the kitchen island to stare at the glass on the ground. He skates through it to slap the faucet off and reaches for Maggie, who braces a hand against his forearm, firm but light.

“I dropped a casserole dish,” she says, like that’s all.

Marty sidles up alongside Rust and sees the glass around his feet, the way Rust is holding his hands at his side like they’re seared raw, and immediately takes his wrists and pulls them up to inspect the other man’s palms.

“You alright?” he asks, smoothing a thumb over the heel of one hand, and Rust nods once, staring hard at Marty’s shoulder with his mouth pressed into a thin line. Maggie makes an ugly sound in the back of her throat caught somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

“He’s fucking fine, Marty, Jesus Christ,” she says, shaking her head and jerking out of Ted’s hands. “Just—give me a minute, Ted, I can’t even think right now.”

Marty’s watching her from an angle, still crowded up in Rust’s space with their arms tangled together. He looks down at Rust’s hands in his and then back up at Maggie, eyes pulled tighter around the edges, gone hard under the yellow light. “You got something you need to say to me?” he asks.

Ted looks between Maggie and Marty and steps around in front of her, instinctive. “Maggie, what is he talk—?”

“Go, Ted!” Maggie snaps, and then seems to blink out of it, voice dropping down to something softer. “It’s okay, I just need—I need you to go. Don’t worry about the glass, I can clean it up in a minute. Just a few minutes.”

When Marty looks at Maggie she looks back. “I need to talk to you, though,” she says. “Alone. Right now.”

Marty steps aside and lets Rust pass, fingers skimming along the flight feathers of an old black bird as he goes. He watches Rust walk out of the kitchen before Ted heaves out a sigh and kicks some glass away, disappearing in the other man’s wake down the hall. The front door opens and shuts, and then it’s quiet, save for the drone of the television still coming in from the family room.

Maggie has gone to the pantry to pull out a broom and dustpan that she leaves to rest against the wall while she steps out of her shoes and bends to pick them up. “You could have warned me, Marty,” she says, knocking one shoe against the side of the trash can. “Maybe said something before he showed up at my house on Christmas Day wearing a goddamn wedding ring.”

“Don’t know why you’re so surprised,” Marty says, straightening a plate sitting cockeyed on the countertop. “Who else would’ve put it there, do you think? Maybe one of his many lovely lady suitors.”

Maggie straightens and slips her shoes back on, snatching the broom up to furiously begin sweeping under the counter. “So where’s yours, then?” she asks, letting the dustpan fall to the floor with a clatter. “I don’t recall you ever finding a need to take it off for anybody else before.”

Marty watches her for a moment with the inside of his cheek clamped between his teeth and then bends at the waist, exhaling heavy on the way down, picking up the largest pieces of glass to stack them in his hand.

“You’re upset,” he says. “That’s fine. I ain’t saying you can’t be, but it might do some good to tell me why—in no uncertain terms, I’m thinking.”

“Why the hell do you think, Marty?” Maggie asks. She goes back to the pantry and drags the trashcan out into the middle of the floor to dump the dustpan into it, waiting for Marty to slowly straighten up before he finally moves in to toss in his handful of glass.

“I don’t know,” he says, stepping back so she can sweep around his feet. “I thought you were happy here with Ted, this life. I thought we’d moved on—maybe gotten past a few things, let some of the old shit settle.”

Marty sighs, reaches up to run a palm over his head and down to cup the back of his neck. “Maybe finally figured out what it was we wanted,” he says.

“Well you’ve made it pretty damn clear what you wanted,” Maggie says, leaning hard into the broom handle. “A gold ring on Rustin Cohle’s finger, and all I can do is sit here and ask myself, how did he, how did this man, Marty—Rust, _Rust_ —manage to pull something out of you that I never could? That you weren’t even willing to bring to the table when the girls were young and needed you the most?”

“Maggie,” Marty says, “I’m—”

She laughs once, harsh and short, and forgoes the broom to kick a larger piece of glass into the dustpan. “But I guess he’s always been just as fucked up as you are and a little more willing than me to put up with it.”

“Stop it!” Marty whispers loud, almost furiously. “Stop and listen to me for a second. I’ve let you talk, now you’ve got to extend the same courtesy and listen to me.”

“Well lay it on me thick, Marty,” Maggie says, falling back to lean against the counter to cross her arms over her chest. “Let’s hear it.”

Marty drags his hand over his face and leans over to brace his forearms against the opposite counter. He drops his head for a moment, and when he looks back up his eyes settle somewhere around the base of her throat.

“Maggie,” he sighs, shaking his head. “I—I regret what I did to you and the girls. Regretted it every day for a long time, once I’d managed to realize, and I—I still do. And I knew there was no getting you back, that Audrey and Macie might have been a lost cause, too, but I had ten years of being alone. Ten years of hard thinking that I ain’t ever gonna get back—”

“That you deserved,” Maggie says, eyes flashing. “After what you put me and the girls through, and—and _Ru_ —”

She stops short, face gone ashen, but half the name has already taken to the air.

“Oh, I might’ve hurt Rust,” Marty says, laughing low, finally bridging their line of sight. “But I didn’t do it alone. And it wasn’t me, Maggie, who decided to drag him into that fucking mess.”

The curve of her throat works as she looks away for a long moment, blinking against the air. “Then why now, Marty?” she asks. “Why him? After all this time—after all that.”

Marty straightens back up and rolls one shoulder. “I know he ain’t what either one of us was expecting, but when I stepped—when I stepped out of that place and got him home, I knew then, I guess. What it was I wanted. Rust was there, and it turns out he was what I needed.”

“No,” Maggie says. “I never doubted that you two deserved each other.”

“I just want you to know,” Marty says, “that I’m happy you found someone you love, somebody who can take of you in—in all the ways I never could, or would.” His lips press into a firm line for a brief moment before unfurling back into something softer. “Ted’s done right by you and the girls, and I’m grateful for that. Grateful that he was there, later on, during all the times I wasn’t.”

Maggie thumbs her hair behind her ears and nods. “Thank you—I did. And he has. He has.”

“So maybe I found that, too,” Marty says, clearing his throat. “Christ—I do, I do love him, Maggie. Sometimes it scares the hell out of me, just how fucking much.”

She keeps quiet and Marty breathes in deep, peering down at his own hands. “So maybe I found him and whatever it is we’ve got going in a weird kind of place, but I think I’ve come to realize, after everything, that sometimes you gotta lose something before you can see how much you really needed it. And maybe that applies to every fucking thing.”

He looks back up and sighs. “But Rust is just— _Rust_ , you know?”

“Yeah,” Maggie says after a moment, picking the broom back up. She nods her head, features pale and tired, all the blue fire finally drained from her eyes. “Yeah, he is.”  
  


* * *  


  
The sun hangs by one thread in the western sky and Rust watches it sink and wane, dipping under the horizon as gold dusk slowly unravels out over Christmas Day.

He’d managed to find one lone cigarette rolling loose in the glove compartment of the Cadillac and had put it between his lips without a thought, not one shit given about almost two weeks off the wagon, then reached for his lighter and found the usual pocket empty.

Nice fucking neighborhood like this one, and he’s still wondering how big a gamble it’d be to ring the bell on the brick colonial across the street and ask for a match when the closer front door swings open and Ted Sawyer comes ambling down the front walk.

He keeps his head down until he gets within a few short feet of Rust and then slows up, revealed expression drawn neutral in the falling twilight. He holds out one hand with a cigar and silver lighter caught between a few fingers.

“Girls told me to leave you alone,” he says, “but I thought you could probably use a light.”

“Would be nice,” Rust says, and then Ted is leaning back against the side of the car with him, passing the lighter over without a word. He watches the tip of the cigarette catch and burn in a pinch of orange ember, and then Rust sucks down about a third in one long pull.

“Much obliged,” Rust says after the nicotine hits him, flicking ash away with the lines of his body gone laxer against the door. “Sorry about all that, in there.”

Ted takes the lighter back and holds it up to his cigar, puffing a few times until the tight-rolled leaves start to glow. “If it’s about that ring on your hand,” he says, “there’s not really anything you need to worry about apologizing for. Least not to me, man.”

“Maggie’s upset,” Rust says, bringing his cigarette back up. “I guess she should be.”

Ted exhales and drops his hand down low by his hip. “Not too sure if I’m ever going to know the full story with what happened between you way back when,” he says, and Rust has to wonder if he means Maggie, Marty, or both. “Maggie’s said a little but I know it’s not everything, and I don’t guess I ever felt the need to push her. Sometimes in a relationship you just gotta let certain things lie.”

“Yeah,” Rust says, blowing a stream of smoke from the corner of his mouth. He shakes his head and takes one last pull that nearly burns down to the filter. “You’re right about that.”

“Whatever it is, though,” Ted says, “I don’t figure I’m apt to hold it against you.”

The front door creaks back open and they both watch Maggie step lightly down the porch stairs, pausing on the walk as she recognizes the two figures standing together in the driveway. The sun has already slipped below the edge of the horizon but her skin still glows in the borderland between dusk and night, hands, arms, and throat a spectral kind of milky white.

“I’ll let you two have a moment,” Ted says, pushing off the car as Maggie gets within earshot. “Be up on the porch if you need me.”

Maggie doesn’t lean back against the car, stands a few feet away with her weight balanced and centered, arms crossed low over her stomach. She watches Rust grind his cigarette under his heel and doesn’t say anything about the butt on the driveway, only draws in a sigh that maybe wavers a little on the tail-end.

“I wish I would’ve acted better, back there,” she says. “But whether you two sprung it on me without a warning or not, I guess I was bound to have something to say.”

Rust tucks his hands into his pockets, eyes flung somewhere in the distance. “I’m listening.”

A songbird calls out across the night, one last note before bed, and it’s none so cold that the crickets aren’t singing. Maggie stays quiet until Rust finally looks up to meet her, and it’s almost like catching sight of the old ghost slumped up against her kitchen table, clutching a bouquet of half-dead flowers like a small salvation. The still-handsome face lined deeper and soft waves cut shorter and gone greyer, blue eyes glassy and bloodshot even under the paltry throw of the streetlamp.

“He loves you,” she says, in a voice she makes sure belongs to her. “Do you love him? Are you in love with him?”

Rust doesn’t bother to pause or think. “Yes,” he tells her. “Yes.”

Maggie nods and turns to look up at the house. Ted is sitting in a white rocker on the far end of the porch, a faint shadow pinpricked by a pinch of fire opal in the night.

“That’s all I needed to know,” she says, letting her arms fall to rest against her sides. “If it had to be anybody, Rust, I guess I’m just glad it was you.”  
  


* * *  
  


It’s full dark out when they finally load up into the car and head home, all the big houses along the neighborhood street still lit up with pretty white icicle lights.

Marty watches Rust say his goodbyes in good enough spirits, as soft and quiet as he usually is with the girls, fingers brushing the baby’s hair, even shaking Ted’s hand and letting the other man clap him on the shoulder as they walk out on the porch. But he’d met Marty’s eye over the roof of the car and something about it had been like two palms turned up against the Louisiana afternoon, Rust’s left eye bloodied and swollen shut while he stood in a parking lot full of men who hated him, all too ready to take it in stride if God was only so willing to strike him down.

In the car here and now, still smelling faintly of smoke, Rust has been watching night flash past through the window going on a five-mile stretch and Marty thinks hard on pulling over, Christmas traffic and hour-long drive home be damned, and then slows up to meet the small reprieve of a red light.

He squeezes the steering wheel and then lets his hands fall, keeping two fingers hooked round the low point of the circle. “I don’t know what she said to you,” he starts in, “but I know what she said to me. And even more than that I know—been raised, knowing this shit—that  when you love somebody, you wanna spend the rest of your fucking life with them, you give them a symbol for that. So that’s what I did.”

The light’s still red and Marty reaches into the space between them, takes Rust’s left hand in his right, curling their fingers together against the other man’s thigh. “And I guess it don’t matter that you’re a man. Because it doesn’t, Rust—not really.”

Rust turns away from the window at that, watching Marty, soft-eyed but intent. “Been yours for a lot longer than just today, Marty,” he says. “You didn’t need to give me a ring to go and prove that.”

“Even still,” Marty says a little hoarsely, drawing his hand up to press a kiss to the back of Rust’s knuckles. “Do you think I’d have given this to you if I didn’t want everybody to know that you’re with me?” He turns and holds their hands there against the side of his face. “That you belong to me.”

Traffic starts moving up ahead and Marty lets their hands down gently to settle together on the console. He can feel Rust’s eyes on him, probably trying to read him down to invisible scripture written on his bones, even though all he’d have to do is ask, because God knows Marty would tell him.

“What’d she say to you in there?” is what Rust asks, quiet, when Marty’s eyes turn back to the road.

“Nothing you need to be worrying yourself about.”

Rust gets better purchase on Marty’s hand, squeezing, thumb pressing light into the heart of his palm. “You sure? Should’ve fucking asked before, if you were alright.”

Marty glances away from the road to look at Rust and smiles. “Yeah,” he says, laughing a little. “Come to think of it, I don’t know if I’ve ever been better.”  
  


* * *  
  


Marty strips his sweater off and drops onto the couch within two minutes of getting in the front door, balancing his reading glasses on the bridge of his nose to peruse the instructions that came with their Keurig. He’s got some Christmas special muted down to a quiet hum on the TV and a glass of green tea sweating on the end table despite December, a generous splash of Black Suede spritzed up around his neck that he slaps into his skin like old times, murmuring, “God damn if this stuff don’t smell the same as it did twenty years ago.”

Rust stands in the kitchen, watching him for a moment, before he strolls down the hall and disappears into the bedroom.

Ghost is stretched out on Marty’s side of the bed and lifts her head up when he walks in, trilling once and flicking the tip of her tail in greeting. Rust murmurs a few low words to her while he shoulders off his jacket and thumbs open the buttons on his shirt, then settles on the edge of the bed to unlace his shoes. The rest of his clothes fall away piece by piece until he’s standing there flush naked, and the cat, at least, doesn’t have anything to say when he pulls a scrap of red from the pocket of Marty’s second gift and steps into it one foot at a time, sliding the lace up over his hips in a single fluid movement.

The panties are snug in all the wrong places despite the vaguely forgiving elastic, cut small and low enough that the thatch of sandy hair below his navel isn’t quite covered, and Rust reaches down to adjust himself, feeling a shiver in his teeth with the lace whispers over the line of his cock.

He thumbs around the edges one last time and has no need for a mirror, only tries to shake the snag out of his walk as he breathes soft and easy and pads back down the hall.

Marty has his laptop cracked open on the cushion next to him when he comes back in, still busy squinting at the instruction sheet. Rust walks into the kitchen unnoticed and runs himself a glass of water from the tap, sipping from the edge of the glass with one hip canted up against the bar.

“What I’m probably gonna end up doing is plug this thing into the wall and hope for the best,” Marty says, leaning over to press a button on his laptop. “Can’t be that fucking hard to set up.” He turns just enough that he can see Rust from the corner of one eye and flips the paper in his hand on the coffee table. “What light socket is free over—oh, my fuck.”

Rust sets his glass down and pushes off the counter, walking without hurry into the living room past their trailer park Christmas tree, six long feet of scarred and ink-stained skin and a snatch of crimson lace not doing much by way of covering his ass or crotch.

Marty can feel a blush burning from the tips of his ears clear down to his chest, and he can’t look at Rust, can’t fucking look at him, has seen the man stark naked a thousand and one times but this is shameful, downright filthy, and god damn if it isn’t exactly what he’d had pictured and even more.

“Rust,” he rasps out, something needless, just to be able to say later that he’d had the presence of mind left to ask. “What’re you trying to do to me?”

“Might’ve occurred to me,” Rust says, swinging one leg around to settle in Marty’s lap, “what kinda cheesecake, exactly, you were thinking about the other day when you had your hands on that panty mag.” He draws his other knee up to straddle Marty’s thigh and rolls his hips one time, experimentally, bottom lip caught between his teeth.  “Or maybe lack thereof.”

“Oh Lord,” Marty says, almost a whisper, and Rust hums deep in his chest as he pulls Marty’s reading glasses off his face, carefully folding and setting them off to the side.

“Don’t you go getting all bashful on me now,” he says, leaning in to nip along the edge of Marty’s jaw, dragging his mouth hot and wet to the soft spot under his ear. “This was your fuckin’ idea.”

“C-can’t hardly believe,” Marty groans, mouth gone bone-dry, letting Rust tip his head back against the couch to nose along the line of his throat, humming and kissing against the place where he’d daubed that cologne. “I must—oh fuck, baby, I must be dreaming.”

“You ain’t,” Rust says, grinding down against Marty’s hip, voice cinched a little tighter than before. “Now liven up some and put your fucking hands on me.”

Rust shoves his tongue into Marty’s mouth and moans long and pretty when two hands reach around to grab a handful of his ass, Marty’s thumb sliding up under the elastic and snapping the lace against the smooth white muscle with a _pop_.

“How you want me?” Rust rasps, hands come up around Marty’s neck, breath catching and hips bucking up hard when Marty mouths against the little dip at the base of his throat. “Tell me, Marty.”

Marty glances down between them and Rust’s cock is half-caught behind red lace and already straining hard, head flushed hot and pink up in the crease by his thigh. There’s the tiniest little slick of wetness gathering at the slit and Marty knows, then, knows what he wants, and he needs his mouth on Rust, needs to suck him raw, needs to wrap his lips around him for a _taste_ —

He’s hooking his arms up around Rust’s thighs and ass and hoisting him into the air without a thought, surging straight ahead and it’s clumsy and too-fast and Rust barely has time to gasp in surprise before he’s slamming back against the coffee table hard enough that the empty coasters rattle, sending a stack of files tumbling to the floor in a flurry of photocopies.

Marty’s splayed out in the spread of his legs, dropped down on the carpet to his aching knees, and Rust is swearing a dirty blue streak and blinking in a daze, can’t move fast enough to keep Marty from pinning his thigh against the table as he leans down and mouths around his cock, hot and damp through the sheer lace.

But it’s not enough, not by a mile, and Marty drags his mouth down to the inside of Rust’s thigh, biting and sucking into the softer skin there until he’s got a red welt raised up, and Rust is reaching down to claw at the neck of Marty’s undershirt now,  hissing, “Fucking shit, motherfucking _fucker_ —”

“What I want is for you to sit here real fucking pretty while I suck you off,” Marty says, getting a handful of the panties and yanking them down on one side, not giving Rust time to think before he bows back over and goes hell-bent on swallowing the length of him down.

Rust bites his lip and trembles like he’s halfway dying, leg still clamped between Marty’s arm and the table with the opposite foot curling his toes into the couch. And the noises he’s making, the way he’s bucking up languid to fuck into Marty’s throat, breathing fast with his muscles tensing up and hopping makes Marty wonder how he ever got through any given day in this life without putting his mouth on Rust.

“Marty, M-Marty _, fuck_ ,” Rust’s saying, the name all but torn from his lips, and Marty sucks and sucks and doesn’t stop, not when they knock damn near every magazine they own and the TV remote off the coffee table, not when he’s gagging with tears streaming from the corners of his eyes, not when the elastic on one side of the lace gives out and snaps clean, not even when Rust’s thighs clamp around his head like he’s a keening woman and salty heat is pulsing against the back of his throat, bursting into rushing bloom on the flat of his tongue.

Rust’s legs go slack and Marty’s sliding off with a dirty sound, leaving Rust’s dick slick and sated against his stomach, and it doesn’t take him long, doesn’t take long at all to undo his belt and get a hand around the length of himself where he still kneels on the carpet, three sharp strokes and then he’s coming like a wet dream, hot and messy on the inside of his briefs with nothing but his breath shuddering up tight in his chest.

When Marty comes back to himself Rust is still panting heavy, laid out flat on the coffee table with the ruined red lace hanging around one thigh. His eyes are shut but he reaches down blind, finding Marty’s hand with warm fingers and locking around one wrist.

“Jesus fuck, Marty,” he says, and slowly sits back up, sending one final magazine sliding to the floor. “Jesus.”

Marty gets his knees back up under himself and rises on weak legs, pulling Rust with him until they collapse onto the couch in a tangled heap, the panties fallen like a broken relic to the floor. It takes some maneuvering but Marty sits back and Rust eventually ends up sprawled long-ways across the cushions, boneless and buck-ass naked with his head tucked in the other man’s lap.

“It’s still Christmas, you heathen,” Marty says when his breathing evens out more, wiping a hand across his mouth before reaching down to pop Rust on the hip. “You ain’t decent.”

“Marty,” Rust tells him, lips hardly moving when he talks, “what you just did to me was not something I’d define using the word decent.”

“Well get ready, cowboy,” Marty says, combing his fingers through Rust’s hair. “Because as far as I’m concerned, we’re in the honeymoon phase all over again.”

The Christmas special is still playing low on the TV and there’s a mess on the floor but Marty bends over anyhow, snagging the red lace with two fingers. Rust glances up at him with his lids cast sleepy before settling deeper into the couch, none too worried about covering up anytime soon.

“The hell are you doing?” he asks, watching Marty stretch the elastic back on his thumb to slingshot them across the room. They end up caught hanging off one branch of the twinkling Christmas tree, and as Marty hoots and laughs Rust’s mouth quirks up on one side, muttering, “You couldn’t do that shit again if you tried.”

“Thinking we should make this a family tradition,” Marty says, cutting his eyes down to peer at Rust. “Nothing against Macie, but maybe one just kept between you and me.”

“Mmm, dunno how good you’d look in red lace,” Rust drawls. “Maybe pink. Something silky.”

“Maybe you’d better strike that thought outta your head right now,” Marty says, even as he leans over to meet Rust halfway, pressing a crooked kiss to the corner of his mouth. “Reckon I like this look on you, though,” he adds as he sits up, eyes trailing over a long stretch of bare skin.

“And here everything I got from you today is something I gotta wear,” Rust says, but when his hand reaches back over his head Marty only nods and takes it, maybe struck a little dumb by it all, watching the gold band on Rust’s finger glint in the lamplight.  
  
  
  
 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today marks nine months since the birth of this fic and I truly can't believe how fast the time has flown (or how that word count managed to rack up on me so quickly, holy hell). We're getting ever-closer to the end now, and I've got a solid seven more chapters left until the close. Much of what comes after this update has been planned in advance since July or August sometime, so I hope y'all are looking forward to it as much as I am.
> 
> A lot of time, sweat, and tears went into this chapter (on my behalf and also Allie's, the most wonderful Herculean beta), and I'm a little astounded by the size of it myself but just kept on writing for a full month until I felt like I'd said everything I needed to say. Keeping that in mind, I'd surely love to hear what you guys think about it, so please don't be bashful about dropping me a line. :)
> 
> There is a lot of sun and light reference in this thing, and I don't know where it might have originally spawned in fandom that Marty is the goddamn sun, but I'd like to call dancinguniverse and her story, [Haunted](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2480672), out for initially introducing the concept to me and creating such a stunning metaphor that I'm apt to believe it from here on out. The "touching every nook and cranny of festering ugliness" bit was inspired by a staggering line taken from Dienda's [And the home of the wolf shall be my home](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2649998). Ted is cray but mostly inspired by a bastardization of Ed Helms characters, and the panties first became a light in my life several months ago when errantcohle posted her small [Rust/Claire ficlet](http://errantcohle.tumblr.com/post/99456707884/posting-that-old-rust-claire-drabble-in-which-rust) revolving around a pretty pink pair, so thank you, Gabrielle, for fueling this hot mess. And finally: the Black Suede, as many of you are aware, is a real Avon cologne that I have appropriated here in honor of Allie (AKA hartcohle on tumblr), who originally gifted it to Marty in one of her ridic sexy True Detective poems. THANK YOU, COMRADES. 
> 
> Lastly, I would like to thank obscurefilm on tumblr, who was kind and lovely enough to illustrate Audrey's "Penance" painting from Chapter 7 for my birthday a couple weeks back. It's downright gorgeous and I couldn't be more pleased with the piece, so be sure to go throw her some love at the original post [here](http://obscurefilm.co.vu/post/104886784339/an-illustrated-version-of-penance)! (I also added it to Chapter 7 itself, if you're so inclined to go back for a peek.)
> 
> Happy Holidays! Be well, and here's to the new year ahead. xx


	28. at the altar

Marty sits up in bed fifteen minutes before the work alarm goes off to find Rust snoring softly and still dead to the world, sprawled out on his stomach with his arms tucked up under the pillows. The house is dark and too quiet without the coffee maker gurgling in the kitchen, and— outside the fact that Rust’s never been one to sleep with his back exposed and is usually up before the sun on weekdays—that’s the first sign, Marty’ll figure later, that should’ve tipped him off that something was wrong.

For now, though, he lets Rust sleep. Glances at the clock and figures he can get his teeth brushed, snag the paper out of the driveway and get coffee going in fifteen, so he slips out of bed and pads down the hall to the bathroom. Flips on the light and blinks when he looks down and finds Ghost curled up in the empty sink, squinting at him with her green and yellow eyes narrowed into slits.

She meows soft and sleepy and Marty snorts by way of reply, watching her from the corner of his eye while he puts the seat up to take a piss. She doesn’t move when the toilet flushes, nor when Marty slaps his hand on the counter a few times to help her get a move on.

“Outta there,” he says, tapping her once on the rump to no avail. “C’mon—I’m about to turn the water on you and then you’re gonna be real pissed.”

Ghost peers at him and doesn’t move, but she’s got all her claws on her still and Marty doesn’t quite feel like chancing his hands to pry her out of the sink at seven in the fucking morning, so he pokes his head out into the hallway and clears his throat.   
  
“Rust!” he hollers, cringing a little when the name echoes sharp off the walls. “Come in here and get your damn cat out of the sink.”

It takes about ten seconds but then sure enough, Rust is stepping into a pair of boxer briefs in the bedroom doorway and pulling them up over his hips as he shuffles along the carpet, lashes so low he might as well have his eyes closed.

Marty steps back and lets him slide past into the bathroom to assess the situation at hand. Rust blinks once and then reaches out to gather Ghost up until she’s curled into the crook of one arm against his chest—already purring, the traitor—, then turns and makes headway back down the hall.

“She’s just as much yours as mine,” he mumbles, sniffling a little, voice thrown back over one shoulder like a soft echo. “Only ever sleeps on your side of the bed.”

“Yeah,” Marty snorts, starting up the faucet to wash his hands. “To fucking spite me.”

Rust doesn’t have a comeback for that and Marty brushes his teeth without further comment, makes quick work of shaving and then limps a little on his way to the kitchen, knee still stiff enough in the mornings to give him trouble even though he’s had the cane banished to the back of the closet for two weeks running.

The alarm never did go off and he glances into the open bedroom on impulse, surprised to find Rust back in bed, curled on his side with the cat nestled up against the curve of his stomach.

“What’re you doing?” Marty asks, stopping by the side of the mattress. He can’t remember a moment like this between them since the hospital after Carcosa, can’t remember a time when he ever stood high enough to look down at Rust. “You feelin sick or something?”

“No,” Rust says, though he doesn’t make any effort to move beyond reaching down to smooth a thumb across the top of Ghost’s head. “I’m getting up here in a second.”

Marty shifts his weight from one foot to the other and palms around his jaw, smooth and still a little damp from shaving. “You want me to call Shelley, tell her we ain’t coming in? She probably hasn’t even left y—”

“Christ, Marty, even if I was sick you could leave me here alone for the fucking day,” Rust says, sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the bed, leaving Ghost with no choice but to leap to the floor. He stands and wavers on his feet for a split second, but is already moving again before Marty can reach out to steady him.

“Don’t worry,” he sighs after a moment, softer than before, and then slips past Marty out into the hallway. “Quick shower’ll do me right. I’ll be out in a minute.”

Rust reemerges into the kitchen fifteen minutes later dressed for work, hair still damp and combed back in waves. His eyes look a little glassy in the early morning light and he only takes two sips out of his coffee before setting the mug down by the sink and not touching it again, leaning there against the counter to eat a piece of dry toast one small bite at a time.

Part of Marty feels guilty when he counts off the days in his head back to January the third, but he stands there watching Rust chew with his eyes shut and does it anyway. Two weeks come and gone, and Rust had spent most of that day at work single-minded and on the edge of being aloof, but he’d managed. Came home and sat outside on his own for a good long time, going through a handful of the cigarettes he didn’t touch too much anymore while he tipped his head back to watch the sky turn violet and darken, and then by the morning of the fourth he’d leaned in to kiss Marty awake before sunrise and that had been the full swing of that.

“You sure you feel up to going?” Marty tries again, and Rust’s eyes flutter open to land right on him, just as hard as they are when he gets his mind set on something any other day, and Marty knows he’s lost right then.

“Get the keys,” Rust says, pocketing his phone and wallet from the counter before heading toward the front door. “Let’s go.”  
  


* * *  
  


They’ve got two new client meetings one after the other first thing, and Rust falls into his usual position standing behind the desk until about halfway through the first when he draws up a chair next to Marty and drops down into it with a little less grace than normal, opening his ledger to spread open across his lap.

Marty tries to ignore him but his eyes keep going back to land on Rust while he fidgets—pulling his tie looser and tugging idle at the collar of his shirt, trying to quell a cough against the back of his hand, asking drawling questions that drop into the pages of his notebook rather than take wing with any of their usual vigor. The minutes tick by in a slow-dragging crawl and by the end of the second meeting when he rises to take the woman’s hand, he’s got both his sleeves rolled slapdash up to the elbows, movements hinging too-soft and dulled as if the air’s suddenly gone textured like cotton.

“Rust,” Marty says, careful, handing him a cup of water from the cooler when it’s just them in the quiet room again. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing I can’t handle,” Rust says, and when he takes the water Marty doesn’t quite miss his fingers trembling a little, ring on his left hand flashing under the fluorescent light.

“Yeah, well you look like you’re handling yourself real fucking well,” he says to the top of Rust’s head, softer than he’d intended, hitching his hands up on his hips before realizing how he must look and letting them drop heavy against his sides. “Listen, the shit we’ve been through now, you don’t gotta—”

But then the office phone rings and Rust is snatching it up off the cradle before Marty can make a dive, already rattling off a greeting and picking up a pen to scrawl a name on a new page of his notebook. He looks up after a moment and half-winks, just a little, and Marty sets his jaw before stomping off in the direction of the break room.

At half past one, Shelley walks in with a takeout bag on one arm and a stack of files in the other. She drops the paperwork off on her desk and then slips into the main office, easy smile all but torn right off her face the second she lays eyes on Rust.

The takeout gets dumped on the edge of Marty’s desk and a dimple deepens between her eyes as she stands in front of Rust, who leans back in his chair to blink up at her.

“Shelley,” he says on a sigh, and she narrows her eyes, falling into the stance Marty had abandoned before with her polished nails braced high on her hips.

“You look as sick as a dog,” she says without any softness, and Rust doesn’t try and fight her off when she leans right in and presses her palm to his forehead, fingers soft and cool where they rest against his temple.

“He about took my damn arm off earlier for so much as thinking about doing that,” Marty snorts from the doorway as he strolls back in with a drink in hand, mouth screwed up into a thin line.

Shelley lets her hand drop down to Rust’s shoulder like an anchor and rounds on Marty. “Why on earth are you still here?” she says. “You’d better take this baby home right now, Martin Hart, he’s burning up with fever.”

“I’m sitting right fucking here,” Rust says, and Shelley’s fingers only dig into his shoulder deeper.

“Yeah, well,” Marty chuckles with his eyebrows high on his forehead, perching on the edge of his desk to briefly peer into the takeout bag. “Turns out _this baby_ is as stubborn as a wild ass and insisted on coming in today. You think he was gonna listen to me, when I suggested laying low at home?”

“Good Lord,” Shelley says, looking back down at Rust. “I’m surprised you’re even still sitting up.”

“Y’all are putting on a good show, carrying on like this,” Rust says, and then swallows thick when Marty cracks open a takeout box of garlic chicken, eyes gone hazy and glazed over. “I—I’m alright.”

“The hell you are,” Marty says, cramming the lid back on the chicken and standing from the desk. “I’m calling it now—we’re done for the day. Get your shit together and come on, less you wanna take a cab home.”

Shelley drops her hand away and moves to knot the handles of the plastic bag. “Go home and get some rest,” she says, while Marty stuffs some files and Rust’s notebook into his shoulder bag. “I can handle things on this end. The longer you fight it, the worse it’s gonna be.”

“Can’t believe this shit,” Rust murmurs, feeling Marty’s hand brush across his shoulders as he comes up from behind. “Just—Christ, Marty, I got two goddamn legs of my own, hold the fuck on.”

He stands and the room rushes fast around him, walls buzzing like a struck drumhead in front of his eyes. Marty grabs hold of one arm and Shelley’s got the other, and Rust locks his knees up underneath him, trying his damndest not to lean into Marty’s side.

“Alright,” he says. “Alright. The car.”

Safely deposited in the passenger seat and back on the road, Rust slumps down against the headrest and breathes deep through his nose, both eyes dripped shut against the moving horizon.

Marty watches him from the corner of one eye, worrying the corner of his bottom lip. “Listen,” he says, stalled out at a red light. “I ain’t ever seen you like this since that night you got fucked up royal on something and went running with Ginger’s crew, and you’re scaring the shit out of me. You fared better half the time after what happened with your gut than you are right now, and that’s saying something.”

“Must've come down with somethin',” Rust says, pushing the words out between his teeth. “Just need to sleep it off for a while when we get back.”

Once he gets in through the front door, Rust makes slow work of ambling down the hall, one hand bouncing him back off the wall when he leans a little too far to the right. Marty brings him a glass of water and a pair of white tablets that he necks dry sitting on the edge of the bed after he’s stripped his work clothes off, and when he slides under the sheet and hits the pillow, he goes still and doesn’t move again for damn near six hours.  
  


* * *  
  
  


Nightfall comes and goes and Marty tells himself he won’t hover and then walks to the back of the house anyways, squinting at Rust through the dark once and again and then a third time by the top of the fifth hour, listening to the soft rasp of his breathing.

He’s sitting on the couch flipping past murder channels like the wind when Rust slips from the mouth of the hall into the living room wearing nothing but his shorts and undershirt, ashen and glassy-eyed in the yellow light. He doesn’t say anything, simply sinks down on the other end of the couch and tips his head back, line of his throat working as he swallows.

“Thought I was gonna have to go in there and raise you from the dead,” Marty says, setting the remote down. “How you feeling?”

“Like shit,” Rust says, eyes fallen back shut.

“You want me to get you anything?” Marty asks. He watches Rust for a moment and doesn’t get an answer, so he scooches further down the couch to draw a hand up to feel the other man’s forehead, still burning hot under his palm. “Jesus, that fever reducer didn’t do a damn—”

“Get off me, Marty,” Rust says, hand pressing down into the junction of his elbow until it drops away. “Just lemme be for five fuckin seconds.”

“If I’d have known you turn into a pit viper,” Marty says, narrowing his eyes as he rises up from the sofa with a grunt. “What’s your fucking problem? You wanna lay around half-dead? I guess that’s your business, though you better believe I’m fixing to make it mine.”

Ghost walks into the room, then, and springs up onto the couch without any preamble, settling down on her haunches by Rust’s thigh like a little green and gold-gazed sphinx. His eyes crack open to watch her under his lashes, and he holds out two fingers to scratch along the side of her jaw before letting his lids sink low again.

“You know cats have a particular sense for sickness and impending death,” Rust says. “She knows something’s wrong.”

Marty glares at the both of them and feels his blood pressure kick up a notch. “Don’t say shit like that,” he snaps. “You ain’t dying, you’ve probably just got the flu—and making it worse with this fucking attitude you’re copping right now, Jesus Christ.”

Rust’s eyes snap open and Marty thinks they’re about to get into it now, but then he’s pulling himself up off the couch, pressing his fist white-knuckled against his mouth and walking straight-backed and quick down the hall.

“What’re you—?” Marty starts in, standing there for a long moment before he trails in Rust’s wake. “You alright?”

The bathroom door bangs open and slams back shut, shortly followed by the toilet seat clanking against the tank. Marty stops short on the other side of the door just in time to hear a thud on the tile, and then the wet sound of quiet retching.

He winces and leans a shoulder into the wall outside the door, two fingers brought up to rest against his mouth. The puking doesn’t stop and he thinks back to that very first morning after their hospital jailbreak, when Rust had been weak as a day-old kitten and spit up most of his breakfast—all two of the bites he’d eaten—in a trash can next to the bed. Fatigue had outweighed his pride, back then, and he’d only slumped against the pillows in a cold sweat and held a hand over his eyes while Marty told him in as gentle a voice he could manage, _it’s alright man, it’s nothing, needed to take the fucking trash out anyhow._

But it’d only ever happened that one time and here and now, Marty wonders what the fuck he’s supposed to do. Rust is a far cry from Maggie knelt down on the bathroom floor, two months pregnant and swearing into the toilet between heaves while he’d tried to hold her hair back from her face, and he surely wouldn’t take too kindly to the tried and true cure for little girls named Audrey and Macie, otherwise known as being set up in a nest of blankets on the couch with a small army of stuffed animals and a pony-printed sippy cup full of ginger ale.

Marty bites down into his bottom lip and raps his knuckles against the edge of the door after the toilet flushes in the bathroom. “Rust,” he says, quiet. “You need anything?”   

“Just—give me a minute,” Rust’s voice comes back, already scraped ragged and raw, and then he’s retching again, coughing and spitting into the toilet.

“Jesus Christ,” Marty mutters to himself, pushing off the wall to get his phone out of the kitchen. He stares at the screen for a long moment when he gets back, shakes his head, and then scrolls to _Maggie_ while he sinks down to lean against the wall outside the door. She answers at the top of the fourth ring, a thread of concern already pulling along the edge of her voice.

“Marty?” she says on pickup, and he can hear the sound of a television fading into the background as she walks out of whatever room she’d been in. “What’s wrong?”

“Uh—hey Mags,” Marty says, laughing a little. “You some kinda psychic or something?”

“No, but it’s pushing nine o’clock on a Friday night and I didn’t think you’d be calling to trade recipes.” Something brushes over the receiver for a split second and then her voice is coming back in firm. “What’s going on?”

Marty lets his head drop back against the wall as he looks up at the ceiling. “Well, Rust is—well, he’s not exactly in a good way right now, I don’t—”

“Is he hurt?” Maggie says, sharp as a whip. “What the hell have you two gotten into now?”

“Jesus, nothing like that, he’s just sick as a damn dog and in the bathroom puking up a lung as we speak. I don’t know if he’s hardly stopped for air in ten minutes, and the man sleeps like a damn monk, but he was passed out cold for six hours earlier and I—”

The toilet flushes again in the bathroom and it’s all quiet for a few moments until Maggie’s voice is coming back in, softer than before.

“And what, Marty?”

Marty laughs again, letting his eyes drop shut against the darkened hall. “He’s maybe scaring the shit out of me, is all.”

“He’s not throwing up blood or anything, is he?” Maggie asks. “If it’s just upset stomach and fatigue like that, he’s probably got the flu. How much of a fever is he running?”

“See,” Marty tells her, “I don’t really know if he’s puking up blood or how high a fever he’s got, because every time I try to get near him, it’s like walking headlong into the lion’s den.”

Maggie’s quiet for a second, and then he can hear her clearing her throat just the same as she always has, trying to swallow down some of the smile in her voice. “Well I can’t say I’d be able to help you there,” she says. “I figure Rust is the only one around who can hold a light to you when it comes to being bullheaded.”

“Yeah, I reckon so,” Marty breathes out, and then stops short, pressing the phone down against his chest to listen through the door.

“Marty,” Rust’s voice is coughing out a second time, half-broken and brittle enough to shatter on the floor.

“Oh hell,” Marty hisses, and then brings the phone back up to his mouth. “Mags listen, I gotta run, I’ll call you back later when I can.”

“ _What—?_ ” Maggie starts to say, and then Marty is ending the call and climbing to his feet with his phone hanging heavy in his sweatpants pocket, taking the knob in one hand and easing the door open into the bathroom.

Rust is on his knees in front of the toilet, ghostly pale with one arm and forehead braced across the cold ceramic rim. His hair’s a mess against his forehead and he’s shaking enough that Marty can see him trembling from where he stands, gone rigid with the doorknob still clenched in one fist.

“Jesus,” he sputters out. “You look god fucking awful.”

Rust turns his head to one side to blink at Marty from where he’s slumped against the toilet, eyes gone bloodshot and glassy. “Thanks, Marty,” he rasps. “Feel real fucking peachy—”

He stiffens without warning and his spine contorts hard as he curls in on himself, vertebrae shining through the fabric of his undershirt, and then he’s hunching back over into the toilet bowl, heaving dry with nothing left to come up but bile.

Marty can’t do anything but watch for a moment, standing there like he’s opened the door into an unfamiliar whiskey dream, and then Rust is reaching up to brace himself and there’s the tiny telltale _clink_ of gold hitting white ceramic, cutting like a paring knife through the haze clouded up in his mind.

He drops the doorknob and goes straight to the sink, dampens a washcloth under the cool water and sits on the edge of the tub—not touching him yet, just waiting for it to run its course, and when Rust finally stops retching Marty reaches out and combs his fingers through the loose curls at the top of his head, trying to brush them back away from his face.

“Fuck,” Rust croaks, breathing out the word like it hurts, though he doesn’t try to lean away from Marty’s hand. “Don’t know if I can get up off the fucking floor.”

“Just give it a minute,” Marty says, folding the washcloth in half and running it over the back of Rust’s neck before smoothing a palm over his shoulder. “If you’ve finally had enough with fighting me off tooth and nail, I’m gonna try and help you get squared up here.”

“You don’t gotta worry with this shit,” Rust says, finally drawing his head up off the toilet seat. “Just—help me get to bed, man, I’ll be alright.”

“Yeah, you look real fucking fine to me,” Marty says gently, reaching up to flush the toilet before standing. “C’mon—rinse your mouth out and then we’re going straight to the bedroom.”

He helps Rust up off the floor and bears half his weight down the hall to the bedroom until the other man is dropping down onto the edge of the mattress, foggy-eyed and shaking. He’s still burning up with fever and Marty doesn’t waste any time with getting his fingers up under the hem of Rust’s wifebeater, pulling it over his head and helping work his arms through the holes.

“Need to put something warmer on,” he murmurs, turning to dig an old long-sleeved sweatshirt out of the dresser. “Raise your arms up for a second.”

“Marty,” Rust says again, eyes slipping shut when Marty pulls the sweater over his head. “This is—fuck, you’re doing too much.”

Marty snorts and lets his hands slap down against his sides once Rust is tucked back in bed, covered up with the sheet and blankets. He sinks down to sit by Rust’s side, reaching out to rest a hand around the curve of his hip.

“Listen here,” he says, clearing his throat. “You’re weak as a snake-bit dog right now, and I guess it’s slipped your mind in this fever-addled state you’re in, but have you gotten a real good look at your left hand here lately?”

Rust cracks an eye open to peer at Marty through his lashes but doesn’t say anything, chest rising and falling soft beneath the blankets.

“You think I was gonna forget you babying my ass the whole time my knee was fucked up?” Marty asks, cutting his eyes to Rust’s face, the blue there burning bright. “What we got running here is a two-way fucking street, cowboy, and if I don’t take care of you, who the hell else is gonna do it? Because you sure as shit ain’t doing it yourself.”

“Shouldn’t have to be like this,” Rust slurs, letting his lids slip low again. “Don’t ever wanna be any kinda burden on you.”

“Jesus, Rust,” Marty snorts out, ducking his head low. “How much are you gonna keep beating that burden stick of yours before I make it clear that for once in your whole damn life, you’re dead fucking wrong.”

He lets go of Rust’s hip and leans forward, running his fingers through the greying waves at the top of his head, pushing a curl away from his temple. “You think I’d wanna go to work every morning with a burden—go to bed with one every night? Please,” he laughs, though it comes out a little threadbare round the edges. “And I’d hope you know I didn’t give you that ring just for the fucking hell of it.”

Rust can only barely keep his eyes open now but he’s there, watching Marty with the tiniest hint of a smile pulling around his crow’s feet. “I know, Marty,” he murmurs, quieter than before. And then, “That somethin else you got written down on your strategic plan to knock some sense into me?”

“Hush your mouth, I can’t hardly believe you remember that,” Marty laughs, flushed a little pink as he reaches out to feel Rust’s forehead again. “We just gotta be responsible for one another now, alright? In sickness and health and all that other shit.”

Rust’s breathing is beginning to even out and Marty sits back, massaging his fingers into a knot of tension at the back of his neck before standing. “Anyhow, you sit tight, I’m gonna try to go to the store in a little bit and pick some shit up. I don’t even think we got a fucking thermometer here, probably need some Motrin or something.”

He pulls the plastic trash can over to bedside before twisting off the night table lamp, and by the time he comes back with a glass of water and two more aspirin, Rust has already fallen back under the heavy hand of sleep.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


When Rust next opens his eyes, the house is quiet.

His head is pounding in time with his heart and his throat feels like it’s been scrubbed raw with steel wool. He’s freezing, and when his toes slip from under the blankets and brush the floor the carpet feels coarse against his skin.

A dreamlike walk around the house and a five-word note scrawled on the back of an envelope left on the kitchen counter proves that Marty’s gone, _should be back in thirty_ , and when Rust presses a hand against the cushion of the recliner it’s still warm enough that he couldn’t have been gone for long.

He stands at the mouth of the hallway for a long moment, letting pain jackhammer a hole in his head one slow inch at a time, and then walks in a half-staggered line until he’s in the bathroom and fumbling on the overhead light.

The morning of the second day after Marty carried him home from Lafayette General, he’d found the bottle in the back of the medicine cabinet. More than three-fourths of the way full with a screw-lock lid, the kind that made a noise like bones cracking when you twisted it off wrong. It’d been purple, and Rust had gagged just looking at the cartoonish picture of the grapes printed on the label before palming the toothpaste and easing the mirrored door of the cabinet back shut.

Back then, Marty’d kept his pain medication locked in a cabinet in the office. He’d poured every beer he had in the house down the sink, one by one, and then never thought to bother with doing the same for a bottle of cough syrup.

He doesn’t watch himself in the mirror when he opens the door this time, only fishes the bottle from behind a can of deodorant and snaps the little plastic measuring cup off the top so it clatters in the sink. Doesn’t think about Marty or himself or too much of anything else, either, when he sits on the bathroom floor in front of the toilet, twists the lid off and sucks down the entire bottle in three long swallows.

Outside the festering burn of bile-yellow, purple is the worst fucking taste on the planet, and he vaguely wonders why he clenches his teeth so hard to keep it from coming back up.

Time crawls on its hands and knees and Rust wades through the haze of pain in his head and the churning in his stomach until he feels like he’s two inches outside himself, like the bathroom is vibrating around his ears, and when he closes his eyes light bursts like sunspots in the darkness, new dawn slipped up to throw sorbet-colored fire against the backdrop of his eyelids.

He tries to stand and his hand seems to sink through the floor when he pushes up, the room gone too-crisp, too-bright, all high oversaturated contrast but still pliant enough to bow in the middle under his weight. Rust stumbles once to catch himself when his knees sway like cattails and hears the shatter of glass breaking nearby, somewhere not too far, and he can’t quite see where it landed but his and Marty’s blue and yellow toothbrushes are on the floor and then there’s red on the floor, too, following him in footprints wherever he goes.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


A full hour after he went out the front door finds Marty finally walking back through it, cursing low under his breath when his keys hit the floor and he has to kick them out of the way before jamming the door shut. The plastic bags from the drug store get dumped off on the counter and he palms a bottle of Motrin from one before making his way down the hall, shaking the chalky orange liquid back and forth as he goes.

“Rust?” he says, just loud enough for the sound of his voice to carry. The bathroom light is on and streaks in a slice of gold through the crack in the door, and as Marty steps into the widest part of it, he looks down and finds half of a red footprint pressed into the cream carpet.

A set of bloody prints curve in a lopsided half-moon arch around the bathroom door and the nausea that rolls hot in his gut nearly makes Marty sink to his knees, but the fear bursts through it and his heart’s pounding so loud and heavy he can feel it beating high in his throat.

“Rust!” he tries to shout and it comes out barely more than a hoarse whisper, his vision clouded over with rainwater and broken windows, blood wine-dark and wet on the carpet, the acrid burn of adrenaline in his chest and he doesn’t have his gun, can’t get to it in time, but there’s only one thing, only one—

Marty half-falls through the bathroom door, remembered procedure be forgotten and damned, and draws himself up fast in the doorway with his eyes gone straight to the floor.

Rust is canted back against the bathtub with his knees bent, sitting amidst what must be a hundred tiny shards of broken jelly glass. Their toothbrushes are on the ground and the tile is smeared with blood. When he looks up at Marty the hollow haunt in his eyes flayed wide enough to see, the soles of his bare feet made to match.

There’s an empty bottle of Robitussin next to the trash and Marty can hear the panic cracking in his own voice.

“What the fuck did you do?” he’s rasping, half-dizzy with it all, kicking glass aside to squat down next to Rust with his hands already on him in a white-knuckled grip. “Where’s all the blood coming from?”

Rust tries to look up and his eyes seem to flutter in their sockets, the light’s too bright and it’s no good, so he’s looking back down and covering them with one hand. “Thought it’d help,” he says, and regret has always tasted like burnt plastic on his tongue. “The normal doses, they—they haven’t worked in a real long time.”

“You drank the whole fucking bottle?” Marty’s asking, trying and failing to keep hysteria locked behind his teeth. “The whole fucking—Jesus Christ, Rust, look at me!”

“I’m sorry, Marty,” Rust is whispering, hand still over his face. “Fuck, I’m so sorry.”

“Okay,” Marty says, a little softer now, though his breath is still coming fast. “Alright—it’s gonna be alright, hold on.” His hands are on Rust’s shoulders and chest, pulling up the hem of the sweatshirt to run over his stomach, checking his arms, his thighs, the palms of his hands. “Did you get cut anywhere else? Just your feet?”

“Knocked the glass off the counter and couldn’t see it,” Rust tells him, jaw working idle for a moment. “I—I didn’t mean to.”

“Good Lord,” Marty says, dropping his head to look down in the space between them, one palm resting in the junction between Rust’s neck and shoulder. “Are you still fucked up—can you stand?”

Rust lets his hand fall into his lap, red-rimmed eyes finally wavering along Marty’s jaw. “World’s still kinda shaking around the edges, but I’m used to it.”

“Don’t move yet,” Marty says, quiet. “Let me take a look at what we’re dealing with here.”

Marty gets a fistful of toilet paper and wipes most of the glass into a pile near the corner, then stoops low to squint at the soles of Rust’s feet, lips pressed into a thin line. He shakes his head and then straightens, turning out the bathroom door. “Need my fuckin glasses.”

He comes back a few moments later with his glasses low on his nose and sits right down in the middle of the blood-smeared tile, reaching up into one of the vanity drawers to fish a pair of tweezers out. He takes Rust’s right foot and settles it on his bad knee, thumb pressed gentle against the soft arch as he turns it toward the light.

“Don’t know how deep it is, but you got something wedged in there alright,” Marty says, and Rust hisses low but the glass comes loose in one piece between the tweezers, pulled right out like a shard of diamond. A drop of blood wells fast and drips down Rust’s sole to stain the leg of Marty’s pants, but he’s already moved on, leaning in close to get a good look at the ball of the other foot.

Two more slivers come out alongside a stream of muffled swears and then Marty’s getting his arms around Rust, helping him off the floor and keeping one hand anchored around his hip while he pulls the shower curtain back.

“Right into the tub, one foot at a time—there you go.” Rust has left two crimson prints on the tile and slicks up the bottom of the shower with a matching set, and Marty turns to jimmy on the faucet before urging him out of his clothes. “Just sit down for now, babe, don’t want you trying to stand.”

Once his feet are rinsed off and the water isn’t running pink anymore, Rust sinks down in the tub, naked and already shivering against the cool ceramic. Marty plugs up the drain and leaves a folded towel on the side, sticking a few fingers under the spout to check the temperature.

“I gotta clean this mess up,” he says, shaking the water off his hand. “That ain’t too hot?”

“No,” Rust mutters, eyes closed, and that’s the first real word he’s muttered in probably ten minutes. He looks gaunt under the lighting, face pulled tight and sallow. “This is a goddamn nightmare.”

“Well it’s a good thing we’ve both had plenty worse,” Marty tells him, grunting as he gets a spray bottle out from under the sink. “Don’t worry about it right now, we’ll get shit figured out as we go.”

A wad of bloody paper towels and the remnants of their jelly glass get cleaned up in about five minutes of scrubbing, all of it dumped into the garbage along with a pair of blue and yellow toothbrushes. Marty washes the slippery feeling of bleach off his hands and then makes to knot up the trash bag, cutting his eyes low when Rust cracks one open to watch him.

“Where you going?” Rust asks, and Marty blinks at him for a moment before stepping over to turn the water down to a slow drizzle.

“Nowhere,” he says, having decided then and there, and eases back onto the floor with his knee groaning the whole way down, bracing one elbow along the edge of the tub. Rust sinks lower in the water, letting it lap up over the scars on his stomach, and Marty thinks about reaching down and gathering warmth in his hands, cupping it up over the other man’s chest and shoulders to wipe away the chill still shuddering through him.

“You warming up yet?” he asks instead, and Rust draws his knobby knees up in the water, already flushed pink from the heat.

“Can’t do nothing for this but sweat it out,” he says. “I—I can’t take nothing else from a bottle. None of that over-the-counter shit.”

“I wish I would’ve known,” Marty says, and this time he does lean forward to palm the faucet off, letting his hand trail through the water on the way back. “Wouldn’t have kept it in the house.”

“Ain’t on you, Marty,” Rust says, not doing anything but letting his eyes sink low again when Marty draws a handful of water over his chest. “I fucked up.”

“Yeah, I reckon I know that tune well enough,” Marty says, wetting his hand to rub around the back of Rust’s neck, gently massaging his fingers into some of the tension there. “But we always make it out on the other side, yeah? And don’t you dare go thinking you gotta make up for any of this shit—except buying me a new fucking toothbrush, I’m gonna hold you to that.”

Rust stays quiet and Marty lets him soak for a few more minutes before he’s clearing his throat and drying his hands on the towel draped over the side of the tub. “Hey,” he says, waiting until Rust cracks open an eye. “Can’t be falling asleep yet, gotta get you put back in bed.”

It’s slow going but they make it back to the bedroom, Rust only barely keeping a towel knotted around his waist while Marty bears most of his weight down the hall. His feet aren’t bleeding anymore but still look tender to the touch, and Marty fusses around until Rust lets him stick a few band-aids in place, sitting there half-naked in bed with his heels drawn close, shivering under the lull of the ceiling fan.

“Need to get a read on your temperature,” Marty says when Rust is finally in a clean pair of sweats and a t-shirt. The thermometer he bought earlier in the evening is wrestled out of its plastic packaging, the little button beeping when he thumbs it awake.

Rust takes it in hand and presses it under his own tongue, and Marty has to bite down into his bottom lip, trying to swallow down the giggle bubbling up in his chest.

“Can’t say this is a sight I ever thought I’d be seeing,” he says, and Rust blinks up sleepy-eyed at him while the numbers climb higher on the display.

“Naw,” he says, clenching the plastic between his teeth. “Just the both of us laid up half-dead in a hospital somewhere, busted to fucking hell. I’m sure this is the real sight to behold.”

“I ain’t making fun,” Marty laughs, pulling the thermometer from Rust’s mouth when it beeps again. “You just look like such a pissed-off little sh—hoo boy, that’s gettin kinda high.”

“What is it?” Rust asks, slumping back against his pillow.

“You’re pushing 102,” Marty says, and then sighs until he can feel his lungs begin to burn. “If it gets bad, Rust, I’m gonna have to—”

“No, you won’t,” Rust says, tucking himself up under the sheet. “I’ve done this plenty before on my own. It’ll pass.”

“You think so, huh?”

“Yeah, usually sweat it out in my sleep. The puking’s always the worst of it.”

“Christ,” Marty says, yawning around the word, and walks over to the dresser to strip himself out of his dirty clothes. He pulls on a pair of drawstring pants and a faded t-shirt and then fumbles the lamp off, heading straight around to slide into his side of the bed.

“You need anything, you wake me right up,” he says into the darkness between them. “I ain’t fucking kidding, Rust.”

“Know you ain’t,” Rust mumbles, the both of them already quieting and going still as fatigue settles in. “I will.”  
  


* * *  
  


Rust knows this is a nightmare. Knows because he’s walked headfirst into it before, wide awake, far outside the realm of the dreaming.

There’s sunlight filtering down from somewhere above, highlighting dust motes and mold spores floating in the warm air, but it isn’t bright enough to cover the heavy taste coagulating in the back of his throat, slathered on so thick he tries to cough it out, spit it up and dispel the burn caught high in his craw.

Metal, powdered white horse and refinery ash, something copper-bitter that shines like rubies and the sweet, balmy smell of new death. A parody stitched together using the horrors of his life, but it’s real, and when he coughs again it blossoms up from his throat and pools on the ground like liquid black, spattering across the tops of his bare feet.

A maze seems to stretch for a thousand years ahead but Rust navigates it in a thousand less than that, back through the tunnel of darkness he’s followed a hundred times before, letting woven branches catch like fingers in his hair and the skin along his arms. He thinks he sees the old black bird shivering under their touch, blinking one hollow-socket eye in a iridescent ruffle of blue-tinged feathers, and then when he looks again it’s frozen, beak pried wide in a crowing scream.

The earth is cold beneath his feet and he has his gun but no shoes, must’ve forgotten them, must’ve left them somewhere, and when he looks down he’s wearing his one white shirt, crisp and so bright it almost glows violet under the weird cast of day slipping through cracks in the tunnel. The path begins to narrow and Rust follows a trail of broken glass and splintered bones, mismatched pairs of baby shoes and pretty stones polished smooth and the tracks of somebody who came before him, footprints pressed soft into what begins to eddy around his ankles like loose ash.

Rust breaks into a wide clearing that arcs around in a great circle, and he waits to hear the whispering void filled with black stars but it does not welcome him this time, doesn’t pull him into the open arms of death. Birds call to one another in the distance and the one on his arm wants to join them but Rust won’t let it, steadies his gun and looks ahead again to find himself standing at the foot of an altar.

The king and queen are there draped in shrouds of yellow cotton and purple muslin, standing high before the offering plate with their white faces bent low in reverence. There is a newborn fawn with its soft, white-speckled coat still damp with the shine of afterbirth, its fragile skull crushed quickly under the weight of something heavy, and a grey-faced buck with a spread of what looks like seventeen points, bloated and distended and eaten away with the slow rot of elemental death.

They flank a third figure, just as naked as the rest, cracked open at the sternum with a ribcage full of tiny white citrus blossoms, and the face is turned away from him but Rust knows. He knows and he can see the pale groove of a scar cut like a thread of lighting over one collarbone, finally sees the square jaw topped off with a woven crown of switch grass and berry cane, and yellow is rushing like water into his nose and mouth and his gun’s gone and the front of his shirt is blooming red and he’s screaming now, full-out fucking screaming nothing but two syllables inside one word that he knows is a familiar name.

Here in the unwelcome darkness, it echoes for eternity.  
  


* * *  
  


“Marty,” Rust’s voice is saying, whimpered out like an old hound dog chasing rabbits in his sleep. “Marty.” And then louder, again and again and again, “No—no, no, oh fuck Marty, not here.”

Marty blinks awake and can only barely find him in the dark, and Rust’s clammy with sweat but still burning up and Marty gets a hand around the black bird on his forearm, shaking gently when he speaks.

“Rust,” he says, hushed and quiet, following the familiar path of this routine stretched between them. “Wake up, you’re just dreaming.”

The other man struggles harder under the weight of his hand and Marty sits up, blinking at him in the moonless shadow. “Rust,” he says again, louder this time. “C’mon back now, come on.”

“The bird told me,” Rust mutters, twisting in bed so the sheet is tangled up around his legs. “Get him…off there.” He sucks in a lungful of air and then he’s talking louder now, nearly gasping, and when Marty leans over to press his shoulder back into the mattress he starts thrashing hard.

“Get him off the altar,” Rust pants in a ragged whisper, and Marty’s scared now, shaking him gently, calling his name but getting no answer. “Get him—fuck you, _fuck you_ , he’s—”

“Rust,” Marty says again, and Rust starts lashing out underneath him, choking and swearing outright, and Marty’s never heard the man wail before but he’s doing it now, the sound a low-keening groan that makes a chill shoot through him like a frozen current.

“He was mine,” Rust sobs, too sick to fight, strength failing and body gone weaker by the second. “He’s mine.”

Marty’s all but laying on top of him like dead weight, trying to keep his arms still and in place. “Rust, baby, you gotta wake up,” he says, low and firm despite his heart pounding like thunder in his chest. “Come back to me—we’re okay, we’re here, it’s just you and me, just you and me now.”

Rust keeps crying and Marty doesn’t know what the fuck else to do, recalls somewhere in the back of his mind that he could damn well end up with a broken nose for being so stupid, but he leans forward and finds Rust’s mouth anyway, landing crooked but still kissing him long when their lips finally meet and brush together.

It’s burning hot from the fever and there’s wetness on Rust’s face but he finally stills under Marty, breathing sharp through his nose, and when Marty pulls back he loosens his grip on Rust’s forearms, watching his eyes snap open in the grey dark.

“You’re okay,” he says when he sees the familiar brightness there, sighing in relief as he bows over to press a kiss to Rust’s shoulder, breath slowing down. “I got you right here, right here with me.”

“Marty,” Rust chokes out, and then he’s shaking again, sobs hitching tight in the air between them, pressed like brittle leaves between coughs that ache down deep in his chest.

He keeps coughing and Marty moves back to give him some room, helps Rust sit up and slowly rises with him. When the coughing has finally tapered off the sobs haven’t quite died yet and Marty thinks Rust is going to bolt, lets his hands drop and sits back to watch him go, but then Rust is turning toward him again, wading weak through the blankets tangled up around his legs and reaching out through the dark until he’s climbed into the spread of Marty’s lap.

Rust hooks his arms up under Marty’s and fists his hands in the soft t-shirt gathered at the small of his back, presses their chests flush together and buries his face in the crook between the other man’s neck and shoulder.

There’s a long moment where neither of them do anything but breathe and then Marty’s drawing his arms up and wrapping them around Rust tight, smoothing one palm down the line of his spine and murmuring nonsense against the side of his throat, pressing the words there alongside a soft string of kisses.

Rust’s still hot enough that being this close is making Marty sweat but he holds onto him anyways, hand drawn up to cup the back of his neck with his fingertips braced in the soft hair there. “You’re alright, baby,” he says, whispering easy, feeling Rust’s heart flutter like a caught hummingbird between them. “I love you—God, I love you.”

Rust shudders against him and another sob wells up but doesn’t quite break, getting stuck somewhere in the back of his throat. He draws his hands up Marty’s back and lifts his face, just enough to keep from sounding muffled, and presses his mouth to the warm skin above the neck of Marty’s t-shirt before he answers him.

“I love you, Marty,” he says, so quiet Marty wonders if he might’ve imagined it. But the shoulder of his shirt is damp and Rust is holding him so tight Marty thinks he might be able to feel the raised ridge of his scar, like he’s trying to merge their lines and colors and shades of light.  
  
Here in the darkness, Marty knows that all he wants to do is let him.  
  


* * *  
  


Rust wakes up inside a damp ring of sweat in bed, pushed up close against Marty’s back with midmorning sunlight striping over them through the blinds, and he doesn’t have to palm the thermometer off the nightstand to know the fever’s finally broken.

He feels like he’s been run through the ringer and left to hang out in a dead wind. His mouth tastes like stale bile and his hair’s plastered to his forehead, undershirt and boxer briefs soaked through enough that they’ve gone clammy-cold. Ache thrums through his bones like a second pulse but he’s alive and Marty’s stirring and stretching back against him, and as far as Rust is concerned, that’s a damn good start to any given day.

“Hey,” Marty slurs softly, already rolling over onto his back to blink at Rust in the daylight, one hand drawn up to press against his forehead. “You feelin any better? Seems like you’ve cooled down some.”

“M’alright,” Rust tells him, nodding a little despite the heaviness sloshing in his head so Marty knows he means it. There’s a wide ring of amber-colored light pulsing on the wall behind the other man but Rust only watches it ripple there like the surface of a pond kissed with a dropped stone and blinks through the vision, because fevers might break in the night but some things never do get better.

Marty watches him for a moment and then clears his throat, scratching through the stubble trekking light across his cheek. “You remember anything about last night, from before you woke up?” he asks, eyes flickering between Rust’s face and the rumpled sheet between them.

“Not really,” Rust says, knowing the half-lie for what it is, but Marty’s eyes are on him again and he never was too good at playing cards. “Some, maybe.”

“Never seen you in a dream like that before,” Marty says. “Usually two words and you snap right out it, but you were—I dunno, man. Real fucking concerned about something, kept saying shit about a bird and whatever else.”

“Probably the fever talking,” Rust says, but then Marty clears his throat again and reddens a little.

“Kept saying my name, too, and not in any kinda good way. Then something about—something about an altar.”

The memory floods back in through the sieve of that single word and Rust’s jaw clenches, stomach bottoming out on itself in his gut. He feels whatever color was left in his face swirl down the drain and Marty watches it go, too, before he’s reaching out to brush the bird on Rust’s arm with one hand.

“You don’t gotta tell me,” he says, thumb tracing idle along the veins in the back of Rust’s hand. “But you _can_. And I’m here askin’, if it helps the cause at all.”

Rust closes his eyes for a long moment. He’s lying in a dampened halo of his own sweat and can hear the echo of his pulse thumping through his ears. There’s not a fucking thing on planet he wants to do less than talk about it right now, but then he opens his eyes again and sees Marty.

“Part of the dream,” he starts in, sucking in a shallow lungful of air. “Part of the dream—something about it was real.”

“Ain’t that how it always goes?” Marty asks, watching him, and Rust has always wondered what it is that makes him jolt awake in the night. “What d’you mean?”

“Fuck,” Rust breathes out, more to himself than Marty, but then keeps on anyway. “You remember when—when Gilbough and Papania and I took that ride up to Delhi? When your leg still had you grounded.”

Marty raises his eyebrows a fraction, dropping his gaze to where he’s thumbing the edge of the sheet. “Uh, yeah.”

“I saw something there,” Rust says. “Down in that place, man. They’d left it there as an omen, I guess, some kind of sacrificial auspice to what they’d planned to do with the bodies if they’d followed through.” He swallows, line of his throat working fast. “If they’d killed you and me.”

“Rust,” Marty says, gone still. “What are you—”

“There was another altar there,” Rust keeps on, remembering the earthy smell of the tomb, the queen with her woven ivy crown, a piece of newspaper pressed into the heart of his hand. “And I didn’t tell you. I didn’t fucking tell you, Marty, because you’d nearly bled out on the living room floor and you didn’t need to hear any of that shit. Not back then.”

“Fuck,” Rust says again, rolling over onto his back and closing his eyes against the ceiling. “You still don’t.”

Marty props himself up on one elbow and watches him, eyes hurt and pulled tight around the edges. “Always thought it was weird,” he says, quiet. “You of all people, coming back in and not wanting to talk a fucking case.”

“What’s one more fucking nightmare?” Rust says. “But I passed the files off to Gilbough, tried to focus on gettin you back up to speed, sat back and just let it ride.” He laughs hoarse, then, the sound of it burnt brittle around the edges. “Thought I’d try and carry this one for the both of us.”

Quiet slides between them for a lingering moment and then Marty is prying back in, careful, two fingers caught in the jamb. “You should tell me what you saw,” he says. “In the dream.”

“Don’t want you worrying anymore about it,” Rust says, sniffing. “It ain’t worth the trouble.”

Marty snorts. “You remember what I said about a two-way fucking street?” he asks. “I reckon it’s worth it to me, after the hell we went through last night. You were halfway out of your mind before I could reel you back in, so consider me already worrying.”

Rust cracks his eyes back open and peers at Marty through his lashes before turning back toward the ceiling, watching the fan spin in lazy circles. “I was caught between those two places—Carcosa and the other one, that one we found up in Delhi. The way they’d done it up, it looked like a magpie’s nest, and in the dream it was like I’d been dropped into a—a kinda melded impression of both.”

“And things were the same but they were different, fucked up how shit gets when you’re dreaming, you know—but then I ain’t ever hardly been able to tell what’s real or not half the fucking time, especially when it doesn’t stay put. So it felt so fucking real, man, like shit was replaying out in repo time, and then I got to the—the throne room.”

He’s talking half-feverish now, as harried as Rust can get under the spell of his own sleepy-drawling tone, and Marty scoots closer and reaches for him, one hand settled warm on his chest.

“They wanted to show me what they’d done,” Rust breathes out, eyes sliding back shut. “It was a presentation, an offering, and I—I think my pop was supposed to be there, my dad and my daughter, except they weren’t—they weren’t them, they were something else.”

“What were they?” Marty asks, soft, thumb following the contour of Rust’s ribs through the fabric of his shirt.

“Deer,” Rust says. “A couple of dead fucking deer, but the little one, the baby—”

The thread of his voice snaps there and unravels, but he doesn’t stop for more than a moment, still holding on enough to choke out the rest of the words. “She’d had her head bashed in,” he half-sobs. “Like something—like something had hit her.”

“Rust,” Marty says, biting into his bottom lip while the other man shakes beside him. “I’m sorry—”

“And then you were there,” Rust gasps, wet warmth gathering at the corners of his eyes but not yet falling. “It was you and they’d hollowed you out from the inside, laid you out on that fucking altar, and that was the third thing. The third thing I’d ever been able to call mine—one more fucking thing I’d failed, Marty.”

“But it was a dream,” Marty tells him, gentle as he can manage. “It wasn’t real, Rust, and I’m fine. I’m right here and we both made it out.”

“But it was real,” Rust tells him, not trying to stops the sobs now. “You don’t know, Marty, you don’t know how—how they’d put a newspaper clipping in Delhi, some picture of us coming off Ledoux in ’95. You and me, right there, and I stood at the foot of the fucking slab in that hole in the ground and I pulled it out of her hand, and all I could think about was how shit could’ve gone down, what they would’ve done to you in the end, and then I saw—”

Marty’s pulling him close now with Rust gone pliant enough to curve into him, letting Marty brush the damp hair away from his forehead.

“Why didn’t you tell me, baby?” he asks, his own voice scraped raw in the middle now, pressing his lips to the corner of Rust’s mouth and below his eye. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Rust presses his face into Marty’s shirt and he can’t talk anymore, at least not right now, so Marty rubs circles on his back and lets him cry, his own eyes sinking shut with the sunlight slanting warm against his shoulders.

“You can’t keep shit like this to yourself anymore,” he says, words halfway muffled in Rust’s hair. “I know some stuff’s sacred, about—about your little girl, and that’s fine. That’s alright. But if it’s about you and me, or anything else that gets too heavy sometimes, you gotta talk to me, Rust. Gotta let me know.”

Rust’s breathing eventually begins to soften and even back out but Marty doesn’t quite let go of him yet, one hand following the familiar path from the dip between Rust’s shoulders to the base of his spine.

“Just so you know,” he says after a while, trying not to smile too hard against the top of Rust’s head, “when I was thinking about meeting you at the altar, I guess I kinda had a different one in mind.”

It’s been one hell of a night and they’re both worked down to the bare white bone, but damn if Rust doesn’t snort right there and laugh weakly against him.  
  


* * *  
  
  


Marty stands in front of the bathroom vanity a little while later, still flushed pink from the hot shower Rust is currently standing under behind the curtain. He reaches for his toothbrush running on muscle memory and then draws up short, wrinkling his nose when he remembers its premature trash burial from the night before.

“We need a couple new toothbrushes, but I ain’t worrying with it until later,” he says, squeezing a daub of toothpaste on one finger and squinting at it before popping it into his mouth. “You about done in there?” he asks, making a face in the mirror as his finger squeaks across his teeth. “Think I’m gonna put some hot tea on.”

“Go ahead,” Rust says, and the way the water’s hitting the ceramic Marty knows he’s bowed over, letting the spray hit the back of his neck. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

Shelley calls and Marty holds the phone between his ear and shoulder while she prattles on about a few new potential clients, and when he’s taking the kettle off the burner and setting it aside she gets started back in on Rust.

“You’re sure he’s feeling better?” she asks. “I know you’ve known him a lot longer than I have but when he gets to moping around he starts putting on like a sick cat, and you know how they don’t let on they’re dying until they’re already—”

“You know Rust’s a grown-ass man, right Shelley?” Marty asks, laughing as he pulls a pair of tea bags out of a canister. “Hitting the big 5-0 next month on the eighth, as a matter of fact.”

“I know,” Shelley sighs, turning her face away from the receiver for a moment to hiss something that sounds like _get your paws out of those flowers, Stella!_ “And I shouldn’t worry so much, I guess, because Lord above knows you take good care of him.”

“Yeah,” Marty sighs after a moment, clearing his throat and watching tea begin to steep out into their mugs. “I sure do try.”

  
  
  


Rust drinks his tea one sip at a time without ever caring much for the flavor, but the heat feels good sliding down his throat and he’s not in the mood to complain right now, slumped back against Marty on the couch, the both of them draped over with a flannel blanket.

Their legs are tangled up on the ottoman and Ghost keeps slipping into the little blanket tunnel beneath, two tiny white paws sticking out from under the fabric. She stays still for a moment and then darts out across the room, meowing loud and tearing fast down the hall with her tail curled up.

“The hell is that cat doing?” Marty mumbles, setting his empty mug down on the end table to pick up the remote. “Cuttin the damn fool.”

“Got her second wind about her,” Rust murmurs, watching channels flip past on the television. “Think she knows I’m feeling better.”

“Well good,” Marty snorts, shaking his head. “I’m glad we’re here to get a load of her expert opinion.”

On that note his cell phone starts ringing, and Marty turns down the volume on the tube before picking it up to squint at the screen.

“Maggie?” he says on pickup, tipping his head back against the couch. “How you doing?”

“Think I should be asking you that question,” she says, and Marty wonders if Rust can hear her voice coming through the line. “I’ve been waiting to hear back from you after that talk we had last night.”

“Ah, well—sorry about that, it was a little rough sailing there for a while, but we’ve got our feet back up underneath us now.”

“Where is he now?” Maggie asks, never one for any nonsense. “How’s he feeling?”

“Uh, right here next to me,” Marty says, and watches Rust turn an ear toward him, blinking sleepy in question. “Probably listening to everything you’re saying.”

Maggie’s quiet for a second but then comes right back in quick. “Well go ahead and let him listen, then, because we both know how he gets and if he’s coming down off the flu, he better be drinking plenty of fluids and minding his stomach. Did you finally get your hands on a thermometer?”

“Yeah, temperature’s back to almost normal this morning,” Marty says, scratching under his chin. “And I’ve already got him set up with some green tea, but we haven’t eaten much of anything yet.”

“Crackers, toast, light soup, even some of those bottled nutrition milkshakes they make for kids, they’re easy on the stomach and taste like vani—”

“Think I’m drawing the line on her there,” Rust mumbles, settling back against Marty’s shoulder. “Only one we’re keeping baby food for around here is Lilah.”

“Is he sitting in your lap or something?” Maggie asks, and she’s an hour’s drive away but Marty still feels his neck heating up hot pink. “Hand him the phone for a second.”

Rust takes the phone and holds it easy up against one ear. “Maggie,” he says in greeting, and then Marty’s only able to catch his side of it from there on out.

“Uh-huh,” Rust says, watching the TV low from under his eyelids. “Sweat it out pretty quick, considering. I’ve had a lot worse.”

He’s silent for a moment while Maggie murmurs indistinct on the other end of the line, and then humming back to her. “You don’t gotta worry so much,” he says, pitched quiet. “Marty’s here, taking good care of me. He ain’t so rough around the edges that he can’t do that.”

Marty can’t help but smile at that and the call ends about a minute later, Rust wordlessly passing the phone back over his shoulder. “That woman is relentless,” he says after knocking back the last of his tea and leaning forward to set the mug on the coffee table. He comes back in and sinks down lower against Marty’s chest, slumped and stretched out like a big old cat. “Relentless, just the way you’ve always liked ‘em.”

“Oh yeah?” Marty laughs under his breath, swatting Rust on the hip. “Think I know somebody else who might fit that bill.”

“Dunno what you’re talking about,” Rust murmurs, tone held mostly even despite the tiny little crack of a smile pulling up one corner of his mouth.  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hoo boy, talk about one hell of a hiatus! I feel like Lazarus returning to you from the dead, except two months sure trumps the shit out of four days. (I AM SO DAMN SORRY.) For those of you who don't keep up with my shenanigans on tumblr or haven't seen me posting peripheral works around these parts in the interim, I apologize for being MIA this long, but I got busy with applying to graduate school, starting up my last semester of undergrad, and finishing a birthday present for a dear friend, which I'll link for you below if you haven't already read it. But it feels good to be back to working on this thing!
> 
> I know this chapter probably has the emotional weight of about ten tons worth of bricks, but I've been promising sick!fic for a long time running and then...well, things just got away from me. I guess it was also important for me to include a callback to what happened several updates ago in Chapter 22, because there needed to be some more resolution there. And as awful as it sounds, I also had a good time writing Rust's dream? I don't often get to do things like that with these two, and it's always an adventure, putting a weird spin on redneck domesticity central.
> 
> With all that being said, I hope to write with a little more speed and efficiency from here on out. I'll be graduating from university in May and then it's the wide open world out there, folks. And I just heard today that I didn't make the cut for grad school this go-around, but I wanted to take a moment to thank y'all, because this fandom, this story, and the wonderful love and support I have found here is the ONLY reason I ever applied to begin with. This might only be a fanfiction on a small corner of the internet, but what you guys have done for me has come to mean the world. So thank you. <3
> 
> Here are the projects I've posted since Christmas, if you're interested in taking a peek:
> 
> [Lone Star](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3402062)
> 
> [under the spell of familiar hands](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3251765)
> 
> [stained glass fragments](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3167279/chapters/6877106)


	29. fifty years

“Happy birthday to you,” Marty’s voice is singing off-key from somewhere close by, humming with a pinch of stifled laughter as his mouth presses against Rust’s neck. “Happy birthday—oh hell, I haven’t sang this shit to somebody in years—uh, to you.”

He trails a few more chaste kisses down Rust’s chest, then lets the tip of his nose drag across the other man’s stomach as his mouth opens soft and wet there, bottom lip skimming over the edge of a long scar. “Happy birthday dear _Rustin —_ ”

“Mmm, Marty,” Rust murmurs with his eyes still shut, stirring out from under the weight of sleep as he stretches beneath Marty’s hands. “What’re you doin?”

“Giving you the JFK birthday treatment courtesy of your favorite hot blonde,” Marty laughs, stalling his singing to lick a hot stripe over the smooth skin below Rust’s navel. “I don’t got great tits but I figure the end result will be just about the same.”

He pushes the sheet down around the other man’s thighs and teases around his cock with his fingertips, wringing a sharp little gasp out of Rust that cuts through the easy morning like the edge of a knife.

“You going hell-bent on making up for last year?” Rust groans, feet shifting and sliding under the blankets as he draws one knee up and pushes a hand through his hair. “Sunrise start and everything.”

“You better believe it,” Marty says, pressing a kiss into the crease of Rust’s thigh before moving lower to swallow him down.  


* * *  


Tammy Wynette had been playing softly over the grocery store PA system and Marty was trying his damndest not to sing along, trying but not so hard that he wasn’t humming the words under his breath while he walked up and down the aisles, dropping tea bags and buy-one-get-one salad dressing into the basket hanging off his elbow.

He came to a halt in front of a wall stacked top to bottom with peanut butters and jellies and jars of preserves, was busy reaching for a pot of strawberry jam when he saw Rust swing into the opposite end of the aisle, carrying a half-gallon of milk hooked on one finger with a bag of cat food wedged against his hip.

His work shirt had been pulled out of his pants and left unbuttoned, creased and rolled slapdash up to his elbows to reveal the scarred body of an old black bird. By all rights he should’ve looked like any other middle-aged soul caught under the relentless thumb of the nine-to-five machine there at another end of a long work day, but tired eyes and slow-straggling steps had always tended to look better on Rustin Cohle. It was something in the way he moved, maybe—somehow the kind of thing that evoked flicker-show pictures of big cats roaming along the edges of their cages, all rolling shoulders and claws carefully withdrawn until the moment finally came to strike.

They’d been living in the same house running on eight months since Carcosa, and that was the kind of shit Marty caught himself thinking about most days. Rustin Cohle, tame enough to touch but never fully domesticated. Rustin Cohle, who still vibrated around the edges with something wild but who folded himself into Marty’s hands without a fight, who slept late on weekend mornings with a little wisp of a housecat curled up and purring on his chest, who knew how Marty took his coffee and who kissed him so sweet when he passed it off in the kitchen that Marty almost forgot to reach for the sugar.

Five months in the future there would be a little girl that changed a lot of things, but neither man had come to know her just yet.

Marty was palming something that looked like a striped mix of peanut butter and grape jelly sealed in the same glass jar when Rust walked up, shifting the cat food to sit up higher on his hip. “You about ready?” he asked, and then cut his eyes to the concoction in Marty’s hand. “What the hell is that?”

Marty glanced down at the jar in his hand, with its swirls of high-fructose grape and caramel colored peanut butter. The label said some shit like _Goober_ , and he blinked before he put it back up on the shelf, stepping out of a pooled memory.

“Macie used to love that shit,” he said, clearing his throat. “Maggie’d fight her tooth and nail, said it was the nastiest damn thing…” He trailed off a little and then turned to tip his head in the general direction of the bakery. “Listen, you want some more of that bread you’ve been going through like Grant through Richmond?”

“I’ll keep eating it,” Rust said, like it was a concession he was willing to make, like he hadn’t been caught three or four or five times standing at the kitchen counter over the past few days, eating a piece slathered thick with butter and jam.

“Alright then,” Marty said, and they walked together toward the front, one last stop before checkout. Valentine’s Day was coming up fast around the bend and nearly every cookie and cake on display had been iced pink or white or red, festooned with rosettes and sprinkles and candy heart messages piped in sweet buttercream.

Rust looked around at the spread and gave the tiniest disdaining shake of his head, something he managed to do with nothing more than a sharp flash of his eyes.

“Don’t you even start,” Marty said over his shoulder, pulling a loaf of fresh bread off the shelf and dumping it into the handbasket. “Something about the sick consumerist celebration of glorified martyrdom and how red icing tastes like arsenic and the inside of a steel drum, I’ve heard it all before.”

Rust hummed a little in the back of his throat, the hard look in his eyes softening into something else. “That was pretty good, Marty,” he said, watching the other man pick up a box of chocolate and vanilla cupcakes frosted with pink and white hearts.

“Do you remember that time years back when I brought them pink cupcakes to the station?” Marty asked. “Tried to be real subtle about it, considering you’d been guarding your fucking birthday like the holy grail, and you still decided you were gonna be a little shithe—”

He stopped short, staring long and hard at the container of Valentine-frosted cakes, and then drew his eyes up to where Rust was busy peering into the bagel and muffin display case, half-gallon of milk already sweating in his hand.

“Rust,” he said, real careful. “What’s today?”

“Friday,” Rust said. “You said as much yourself four times at work in about two hours.”

“Fuck you, I’m serious. Friday the what?”

“Friday the eighth.”

It was cold in the bakery but Marty felt a bead of sweat slide down his back, tickling like a slow-trailing fingertip the whole way down his spine. He swallowed hard on reflex, tongue suddenly stuck flush against the roof of his mouth, and willed his hands to put the box of cupcakes back on the shelf without dropping them to the floor.

“You let me go the whole fucking day,” he breathed out, pausing to chew on the inside of his lip before lowering his voice to something edging on dangerous. “The whole goddamn day, top to fucking bottom, without reminding me it was your birthday?”

Rust’s eyes flicked up easy, soft-edged apathy cast in the weight of his lashes. “Never been something I marked down on the fucking calendar. Can’t say I’m too big on celebrating it.”

“Jesus Christ,” Marty said, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

He walked over to the cooler next to the freezer, peered down into the spread of boxed premade cakes, and then looked back up at Rust. “Chocolate or vanilla?”

“Marty, you don’t need to—”

“Chocolate. Or. Vanilla?”

Rust shifted the bag of cat food further up on his hip and let out a breath like a slashed tire. “Vanilla, I reckon.”

Marty picked up a plain white cake from the display, set it on top of the basket still hooked around his elbow, and then led the way toward checkout.

   


Rust ate around the frosting on his wedge of cake one bite at a time, picking the yellow away from the thick lard-white until he had nothing but a shell of empty icing left on his plate. Marty cast a wary eye over it but didn’t say a word, only swirled a mouthful of microwave-nuked coffee around the bottom of his cup and pushed his own plate away before sitting back at the kitchen table.

“This is the saddest fuckin excuse for a birthday I’ve ever sat through,” he said, blinking once before his resolve finally caved in on the abandoned frosting. “You—you’ve left half your cake on the plate. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? Tile the fucking bathroom with it?”

“Probably could,” Rust said, putting his fork down to thumb around his mouth before cutting his eyes back up. “It’s about like eating rubber cement.”

The scowl on Marty’s face wavered and then broke, mouth screwing up into a crooked grin before he slumped back and snorted. “Shit,” he said on a weak laugh, one palm slapping against his thigh. “I guess it is.”

They watched one another for a few moments. The AC clicked off down the hall and then Marty said quietly, almost hesitantly, “How old are you now, exactly?” He reached up to press into his eyes, shaking his head a bit. “If I’m pushing 54 this year, you must’ve just turned—”

“Forty-nine,” Rust drawled, standing from the table and stacking his plate on top of Marty’s.

Marty stood from his chair and followed him to the sink, hedged his bets and then slid up close behind Rust, letting his hands rest light around his hips. He put his chin in the crook of the other man’s shoulder and watched him rinse their dishes under the faucet, none too distracted by Marty pressed against his back.

“You know, it ain’t midnight yet,” Marty said, hooking a thumb in one of Rust’s front belt loops. “We’ve got time left to celebrate.”

“We do?” Rust asked real low, busy swirling dish soap around the bottom of a tea glass. “How you figure we’re gonna do that?”

Marty’s hand slid up underneath the hem of Rust’s undershirt, fingertips gently skimming along the skin of his stomach before his palm splayed wide and warm. He turned his face and kissed the soft place behind the hinge of Rust’s jaw, humming a little bit when the other man’s hands finally faltered in the water.

“I’ve got one or two ideas,” Marty said, growling when he felt Rust’s ass push back against his groin. “If you wanna follow me down the hall and to the bedroom, I’d be happy to list them out for you.”

Rust reached forward to palm the faucet off and then tipped his head to the side, letting Marty kiss a hot trail up the side of his throat. “What if I wanted a prost and a suitcase full of blow for my birthday?” he asked, voice hitching a little when Marty’s fingers skimmed down below his beltline.

“Says the man who used to turn into a pillar of salt in front of any woman who looked crossways at you with fire in her eyes,” Marty snorted. “Besides, I can do anything a hooker can do and I’m givin it up for free.”

Marty laughed against Rust’s skin, stepping back so they could turn to face one another there in front of the sink. Rust had him up against the counter in a flash, two hands anchored around his ass, already pressing hot and hard into Marty’s thigh through his pants.

“And the blow?” Rust asked, nipping at Marty’s mouth.

“Don’t know about any suitcase,” Marty said as Rust started working his belt open, knowing full well they weren’t ever going to make it to the bedroom. “But I’m thinking the big 5-0 Blow would be a good gift for next year.”  


* * *  


“Oh fuck, Marty,” Rust hisses, one hand fisted in the sheets with the other raking back weakly through his hair. “ _Fuck_ that’s good.”

Marty licks a long stripe from base to tip and Rust makes a sound like he’s dying, hips bucking up under Marty’s hands when the other man takes the head of his cock into his mouth and sucks.

Rust wouldn’t hardly believe the kind of sounds he makes when he gets like this, the little half-bitten moans and stuttering sighs and sweet whimpers he gives away in exchange for Marty. He wouldn’t believe it and sometimes Marty wishes he could record a morning like this as it unfolds between them, selfishly, as testament to keep and hold onto. But even that feels something like a small betrayal—giving anything but four walls and himself this look into Rust, who has only ever given it up to Marty.

Rust moans low in his chest and Marty takes him deeper, not quite registering the high trill that rings in the open doorway or the bed dipping light under the weight of four paws.

Something soft tickles along his arm and then the side of his face and he nearly chokes, has to draw back off Rust’s dick and wipe his mouth to gape at a pair of green and gold eyes staring back at him. Ghost meows again and sits right next to Rust’s naked thigh, curling her tail around her feet.

“Marty,” Rust groans with his eyes still clenched shut, grabbing at the shoulder of the other man’s shirt. “God, don’t you stop.”

“Get your prissy ass off this bed,” Marty snaps, slapping his hand down in the sheets next to the cat. “Get!”

She doesn’t budge and Rust’s eyes crack open to peer down the bed, looking dazedly between Ghost and Marty. “Don’t worry about the cat,” he says, skimming one heel across the sheets with his stomach tensing tight. “She ain’t bothering me none.”

“The fuck is she up here for then, a free show?” Marty asks, popping her light on the rump to no avail. “Rust, for Christ’s sake, I can’t—how the fuck am I supposed to suck you off with the fuckin cat in my face?”

“Since when you ever been put off by a little pussy?” Rust tosses back with a rasping laugh, and Marty’s eyes burn a fiery kind of blue and then Rust suddenly isn’t laughing anymore, neck arched back with a shallow thrust canting up to meet Marty’s throat.

Ghost pads toward the headboard to perch on an abandoned pillow and Marty sucks and hums and takes Rust in until his eyes water, puts his hands to work and breathes deep through his nose. He’s always been good at this no matter who was on the receiving end, loves giving it like he loves Sunday night football and perky tits and cold beer, and it doesn’t take long before Rust is all but vibrating under his touch, giving a strangled little half-cry and flooding salty warmth into his mouth.

Marty’s halfway hard in his boxers and wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his t-shirt before resting his forehead against Rust’s thigh, listening to the mixed rhythm of their harsh breathing. It only takes a moment before Ghost finds her cue, and then she’s getting up to rub along Rust’s side with her tail skimming the whole way down his body, meowing loud against Marty’s ear.

“I’m gonna kill her,” Marty rasps, sitting up to flop down alongside Rust while the cat scurries out of the way. He presses his crotch against the other man’s hip and gently ruts there a little bit one time, running a hand over Rust’s stomach and chest. “How you feeling, birthday boy?”

“Over the hill,” Rust says with a tiny quirk at the corner of his lips, and when he turns over he licks right into Marty’s mouth, tongues over his bottom lip and hums low when he tastes an echo of himself there. Marty groans and Rust threads a hand down between them, palming heavy through the fabric of his boxers. “You need a hand?”

Marty pushes into Rust’s palm and reaches around to pull his naked body closer. “I ain’t ever been one to turn down an offer from you,” he says, and goes to pull his shorts over his thighs when another shrill meow rings out above their heads, a set of little white paws stepping onto the pillows between them.

Ghost butts her head into Rust’s hair and Marty bites out a low swear when the other man reaches up to pet her, stoking up a rolling purr. Rust sighs and presses his hand to Marty’s chest, mouth hardly moving when he talks. “You gotta feed her first,” he says, fingers skimming lower over the other man’s belly. “I’d get up but I can’t hardly fuckin move.”

The cat turns and presses the tip of her cold nose against Marty’s cheek and he sits up with a strangled noise and a start, back cracking as he swings his legs over the side of the bed. “Well you’d better c’mon, then,” he says, standing and hitching his boxers up as he pads across the carpet. Ghost’s tail shoots up like a black flag before she leaps down to trail in his wake, meowing as she trots fast down the hallway.

Marty nearly jogs to the kitchen and clocks the cat food container in a hurry, picks it up and pops the lid open. “Girl,” he says on a sigh as he leans over her bowl, “you better be glad I didn’t punt your ass clear across the living room just now.”

Ghost winds around his legs and then gently bites the back of his calf, skittering across the floor with her tail akimbo when Marty hollers with a little half-shout and jumps, dumping two heaping handfuls of kibble on the tile. It scatters everywhere and he’s cursing a vivid blue streak, slamming the top back on the container and shoving it back on the counter.

“Jesus fuckin—you happy now?” he snaps, skating through cat food to twist around and look at the back of his leg. Ghost blinks at him and then walks straight over to her dish, crouches down on her haunches and promptly starts crunching on breakfast.

Marty surveys the mess for a beat and blinks, turns on his heel, and walks back down the hall. Rust is still sprawled out in bed and Marty all but dives in after him, collapsing face-first into the pillows with a groan.

“You feed her?” Rust asks, reaching over to skim a thumb along the line of Marty’s spine, drawing up the hem of his t-shirt on the way.

“Yeah, for the next fucking week,” Marty says, shivering a little before he works his shirt back over his head and tosses it to the foot of the mattress. “Now where were we?”

  


The day has only barely brushed elbows with midmorning when they get showered and trail out into the kitchen. Ghost is sitting vigil on the arm of Marty’s recliner and Rust stands by the counter with his hands hitched up high on his hips, eyeing the kibble still strewn across the tile floor.

“You have a fuckin seizure while you were feeding the cat?” he asks, looking up when Marty brushes past him to get the broom and dustpan from behind the refrigerator.

“Just a minor mishap is all,” Marty says with his back turned, running the broom under the cabinets and around the trash can. “She got fed, alright.”

He makes quick work of sweeping up while Rust puts coffee on, and when he’s knocked back the day’s vitamins and gotten halfway through his second piece of toast he glances at the clock and pushes back from the kitchen table with a grunt.

“Got something I need to pick up this morning,” he says, watching Rust look up from the newspaper crossword he has spread flat on the tabletop. “Gotta do it early, since I’ve got something planned for us later in the day.”

Rust rests the end of his pen against the middle of his bottom lip, tapping it there once while he watches Marty with sleepy eyes. “You rent out the Chuck E. Cheese this year?” he asks, reaching for his coffee with his face held even, and Marty makes a harsh noise in the back of his throat.

“You’d better be glad it’s your birthday,” he murmurs, standing from his chair. “We’ve got a little drive ahead of us but I think you’ll like it once we get to where we’re going.”

“Where’s that?” Rust asks, darkening a letter on the crossword before looking back up. Marty doesn’t answer and Rust watches him for a long moment before tipping his chin up a fraction. “We both know you can’t keep a surprise worth shit.”

“I can’t?” Marty says, turning round with his eyebrows high on his forehead, busy twisting the tie back around the bread bag. “That ring on your left hand begs to differ.”

Rust’s eyes drop to the plain band on his third finger, a little flash of yellow gold if he turns his hand into the light. “I figured you were up to something round Christmas,” he says, clearing his throat before he looks back up at Marty. “Got lucky that time.”

“Well the luck ain’t run dry yet,” Marty says, drumming his fingers across Rust’s shoulders as he walks out of the kitchen. “You stay put for a little while, I’m gonna get dressed and head out.”

  


Fifty years trapped in the bag, and Rust figures that much deserves a cigarette.

He sits out on the back porch with the sliding door cracked open, just enough for the cat to slip in and out as she pleases. A pair of mockingbirds are fussing in the crepe myrtle tree and he watches them as he blows smoke from the corner of his mouth, eyes briefly dropping to flick a bit of ash off the leg of his jeans.

Marty will smell the smoke the second he walks back through the front door. He’ll raise an eyebrow, probably, and riffle through the mail on the counter one piece at a time. “Where you keep hiding them things?” he’ll ask like he’s trying to finger a suspect chance of rain in the forecast, and Rust will say _I don’t hide them_ because he doesn’t.

They’ve been going on walks lately, in the early mornings or late in the evening after suppertime. Rust hasn’t owned a single pair of walking shoes in his life and doesn’t plan on changing that anytime soon, but he still walks for the sake of walking. Meandering barefoot in the grass or laced into his boots, either way, he’ll suck in the taste of barbecues burning around the block or the smell of wet ozone on hot asphalt after it rains and keep pace alongside Marty. Marty, who tells him to watch out for uneven rifts in the concrete and always kicks the neighbor’s forgotten newspaper up the driveway instead of stepping over it. Who says, _your feet are gonna be black as tar by the time we get back_ and _do you think the front yard would look good done up with some wisteria like that?_

His knee still gives him trouble on the odd day but he’s been talking about things like running, writing, fishing, doing. Marty in a newfound state of i-n-g, and Rust thinks about that as he sucks the last pull off his cigarette and stubs it out on the patio floor. He’s been in a newfound state of something himself these days, maybe. Something like living.

And if he looks back far enough, flips through the old rolodex and tries to snag the memory of a different birthday come and gone, there’s one or two in there that stand out. The year his father gave him a hide-bound book of thick ivory paper to fill and another spent with a toddler in his lap, whose little peals of laughter made his mouth twist up into a smile while he blew out the lone candle on a cake Claire baked from the box.

Most of the others mesh and blur and bleed into something he can’t tease free from his mind, and Rust thinks about that, too, when his phone chimes from the kitchen counter.

He waits a few moments but then pulls himself up from the deck chair and slips back through the sliding glass door. He checks to see if they have milk in the fridge before he even touches his phone, but when he picks it up and thumbs on the display the message isn’t from Marty.

There’s a picture of Lilah in a little blue dress, precariously standing on her tip-toes on Audrey’s knees and grinning with two new teeth shining. She’s all blue eyes and long lashes and she holds tight onto her mother’s fingers to keep herself upright, but this is the first time he’s ever seen her stand on her own.

 _Happy Birthday Poppy!_ the rest of the message reads. And then the next one, _Pretty soon she’ll be walking over to see you and Dad all by herself._

When Rust blackens the screen, he closes his eyes and smiles.  


* * *  


“No peeking, now,” Marty says when he carries a small white box into the kitchen, pulling the sun-lit smell of February through the house behind him. He quickly rearranges the top shelf of the refrigerator and then stows it away, keeping the yellow receipt page taped over the little plastic window on top.

“You think I don’t know that’s a cake?” Rust asks from where he’s canted up against the counter, though any telltale sarcasm has been drained out of his voice to leave it something softer.

“Of course it’s a cake, wiseass,” Marty says, pulling a glass out of the cabinet and reopening the fridge to fish out a pitcher of tea. “But you don’t know what kind, do you? And you ain’t gonna know til we get home tonight.”

Rust watches him for a moment and then cuts his eyes low, idly running his fingertips along the edge of the countertop. “I don’t expect you to turn out anything big, you know,” he says, clearing his throat a little bit. “Don’t really need any kinda celebration. Never have.”

“Oh, I know you don’t _need_ one,” Marty says with a grin, pressing the tip of his tongue into one of his canine teeth. “But I wanted to do something small. It ain’t anything big to put you on the spot.”

He moves across the kitchen floor and steps into Rust’s orbit, and these days they fit together without any awkwardness in their misaligned seams. Marty’s hands settle low around Rust’s hips and in another time or place it would’ve been strange, holding onto a man without the soft curves of a woman’s body to dip his hands into, but here and now he does it freely without a straggling thought.

“I hope you like it,” Marty says while Rust watches him from beneath heavy-lidded eyes. He leans in a little further, can hardly seem to help himself this morning, and lets the rest of the words skim over the skin of the other man’s throat. “I think you will.”

“All this big talk,” Rust says, though his hands slide easy up Marty’s sides. “When you gonna drop the ace up your sleeve, hmm?”

“Soon as we get there,” Marty says, smiling when he feels Rust hum in his chest. “You’re gonna have to wait until then to figure it o—”

Marty’s phone rings in his pocket, loud and harsh in the quiet of the kitchen, and his face screws up while he steps back to fumble it out of his jeans and squint at the screen before answering.

“This is Martin Hart,” he says, bracing one palm against the counter before his eyes dart back up to watch Rust, listening. “Yes, yeah—we were coming tonight to—what?”

His mouth tightens up right away, teeth already clamping down on the inside of his cheek and Rust can clock that look from ten years and ten miles off. “You think you could’ve managed to give us more than eight hours’ notice?” Marty asks, tone clipped down to the quick. “Unanticipated maintenance. Alright. Yeah, it was a birthday gift. No, I don’t want to reschedule—it was today, so it looks like we’ll be going elsewhere.”

An apology rattles on the other end of the line and Marty listens to it with the bridge of his nose between two fingers, exchanging a pinched farewell before he hangs up and slides his phone across the counter with a sigh. He peers back up at Rust and the smile on his face looks like he’d have a better time biting into a sour crabapple.

“Change of plans,” he says. “We’re suddenly out of a birthday present.”

Rust eases himself down onto one of the bar stools and braces his elbows on the counter, chin resting on the back of his clasped hands. “Where’d you plan on going, originally?” he asks, idly thumbing along the line of his jaw.

Marty looks at him and then somewhere out the sliding glass door. “Observatory over in Baton Rouge has night viewings available to the public sometimes,” he says, curling his tongue around his bottom lip as he shakes his head. “I don’t know—figured you’d like to get a good look through one of those big telescopes, maybe.”

Rust’s thumbs come up to briefly press against his mouth, only half-hiding the tiny smile pulling there. “You’d gone and set that up for me?”   
  
“Well yeah, Rust,” Marty says, laughing a little when his eyes flick back over. “Least I could fucking do, you know, and now I wish I would’ve done something more. I mean, we got a dinner reservation over that way, but I don’t really see a point in making the trip if—”

“Why couldn’t we?” Rust asks, gently dropping his hands to the counter. “Be nice to get out for a little bit, regardless. Head that way and take some time to enjoy the drive.”

Marty’s lips are parted, drawing in a whispering kind of breath. “What is it you’re wanting to do?” he finally asks. “Just get in the car and go?”

“Lot of folks tend to get lost in the general direction of wherever it was they thought they were headed,” Rust says, like this is the kind of proverb Marty might’ve grown up learning in Sunday school. “Doesn’t necessarily make it something not worth the walk out there.”

“Shit,” Marty snorts, though he steps around the counter and gently runs his fingers through Rust’s hair as he walks by. “You must be gettin’ real wise in your old age.”

“What’re you thinking?” Rust asks, turning to watch him amble down the hall.

“Thinking you need to come get a nicer change of clothes together,” Marty’s voice comes from the bedroom. “Because come hell or high water, I’m still taking your ass to dinner.”  


* * *  
  


Most landscapes Rust has ever touched down on have been in a state of decay beneath his feet. Old death in deer carcasses half-buried in melting snow, already picked clean by the ravens and bleached white by too many lonely seasons spent under the Alaskan sun. Newer death in the cracked asphalt of Texas that stretches through the desert like a sieve slowly filling with sand, not to mention a smaller death of a different kind.

Louisiana is verdant and bitter-green and overgrown with breathing swamp but it’s still dying all the same, splitting along the edges as roots push up like gnarled fingers through cement laid out in a vain effort to break the land. Bit by bit, year by year, the water swallows another mouthful of earth, and the only reason people tend to forget is because the further you get away from the wilderness, the easier it is to mask over the taste of rotting water and sprawling death.

But it won’t last.

Rust watches the land flash by as they take a detour off the road-blocked highway, gradually leaving behind brick and beige stucco for wood frame porches and old barns walled with corrugated tin, everything beyond a certain point eaten up with time and corrosion and the hard slap of poverty. Rawboned horses stand out under scrubby oak shade with their tails swishing, larger idols inside a circle of small goats while cows stand guard over their springtime calves and let black coats blanch brown under the beating Cajun sun.

“This a fifteen-mile detour or did I miss the fucking loop-around?” Marty asks when the car rolls up to a four-way stop cornered on two sides by clay dirt road. He looks in either direction and then once in the rearview, and the way they came is empty of traffic save for a nanny goat wearing a bell trotting across the road, stepping light-footed into a quilted patch of spring clover.

Cane fields border them on one side and grassland stretches alongside the narrow asphalt to the edge of the horizon, dotted with patches of planted earth and trees standing guard over farmhouses that’ve seen the turnover of fifty years and more. The land curves like a low-rippling wave, giving them just enough sprawl to make out a sea of yellow smearing like a mirage in the distance.

“Keep driving,” Rust says, nodding ahead. There’s a plywood sign propped up on the roadside, whitewashed and hand-painted with a crude strawberry. _Home-churned ice cream, two miles_ has been blocked out in faded green paint next to an arrow pointing the way, and Marty blows out a quiet sigh but urges the car forward.

“You got a hankering for ice cream?” he asks, glancing at Rust from the corner of his eye before peering back out the windshield, sliding his hand away from the AC blowing cold against his knuckles. “Probably gonna catch a nail in the road out here, bumfuck as it is.”

The words and the place snag something crooked in Rust’s mind and he turns away from the window to look at Marty head-on, almost expecting to see a thick thatch of corn silk hair not yet bitten grey, a crackling police radio stuck in the dash and a wall of unspoken tension burning like fired brick between them.

But it’s only Marty here and now, the Marty he calls his own—softer at the seams and with more grey in his thinning hair, fine lines pulling a little at the corners of his eyes when he barks out a laugh and says, “What?”

“Nothing,” Rust says, turning again to look ahead. He almost wants to slide two fingers between the buttons of his shirt to touch the scar on his stomach, something to ground and anchor, but then the car glides over a cresting hill in the road and the world turns yellow.

“Well goddamn,” Marty says, slowing the car a little despite himself. It’s another half-mile to the next homestead but they both gaze at the fields of sunflowers running parallel on either side, stretching on for what seems like miles. “You ever seen a crop of them like this?”

Rust thinks of warm earth and a little white sundress dirty at the hem, the way her eyelashes would catch the sun and how she wanted to sit up high on his shoulders to be eye-to-eye with the tall flowers.

“No,” he says, spotting the bare wooden house with its wide wraparound porch, heralded by another weatherworn sign advertising home-churned ice cream. “Not in a real long time.”

  


The house they park in front of hasn’t been used as such for a while, a small mystery quickly solved by catching sight of the rickety picnic tables and sun-faded advertisements hanging in the windows along the front. A general store or a bygone remnant of a backwater soda fountain, maybe, with the proprietor’s humble home set a-ways back from the road in a hollow not brimming with sunflowers.

There’s only one other car in the gravel lot, a dusty jeep that probably belongs to the middle-aged woman and little boy licking around strawberry sugar cones at the far end of the porch. An old farm dog comes out in greeting as soon as they step out of the car, tail wagging low and panting easy, and Rust smoothes a hand over his head while Marty walks up to the old man wearing bib overalls sitting by the door on the porch.

“Afternoon, sir,” he says, nodding a bit, stepping right back into that country stance of his with ease while he watches the old timer carve something crude from a hunk of pale wood. “We were passing through, saw y’all advertising some ice cream. This the right place?”

“Go on inside if you like,” the old man says, nodding toward the screen door. His skin is dark and deeply lined, and when he moves his jaw a certain way his dentures shift around in his mouth. “Miss Cleo be happy to serve you.”

Marty turns to glance at Rust as he climbs up the porch steps behind him. “What you want?” he asks, and Rust shrugs as he sits down at one of the picnic benches.

“Whatever looks good,” he says, and Marty nods before swinging open the squeaky screen door and disappearing inside.

A breeze comes in from the south, making little swirls of dust eddy around the dirt lot while the old dog lounges in the shade of the Cadillac. Chimes tinkle faintly from somewhere nearby and Rust squints up at the bare wooden eaves of the porch, garlanded with hanging pots of geraniums abloom with bursts of red and white. It’s all a rustic picture cut clean from somewhere lodged half a century in the past, and then at the far end of the awning there’s a familiar bundle of dry sticks hanging from a length of rusted chain. They’re fitted into a rough-hewn triangle, elbow joints wrapped with twine and thin strips of sun-faded burlap.

It sways and spins gently in the wind, making no noise of its own as Rust watches it. He’s probably seen a thousand of these or more inside the past two decades and the faintly familiar taste of metal won’t ever go away, sprung right up on the back of his tongue just like it had on that first January morning on the edge of a fire-scoured cane field. Aluminum and ash, scattered like powdered bone on the breath of Louisiana.

The old man in the rocking chair is still whittling away on that ugly piece of wood, one gnarled thumb held out to keep from getting kissed by his knife. He hasn’t spoken a word since Marty stepped behind the screen door but looks up from under grizzled eyebrows when Rust turns toward him, waiting for the unspoken question resting on his lips.

“What’s that for?” Rust asks, and the old man throws his eyes right to the devil net like he’d known all along.

“That right yonder?” he says even though it’s only a few yards away. “Trap the demons. All this pretty yellow, we got to keep the devil out.”

Rust nods once and squints back out across the blooming sunflower fields, come alive as they rustle and dance with one another in the dying breeze. “You reckon it does the trick?” he asks.

“Work fine to me,” the man says, looking down and curling up a thin wood shaving under his blade. “We got no business with the devil round here.”

Marty comes back onto the porch with a paper cup of ice cream, then, and passes it off to Rust wrapped in a napkin. “Got you strawberry,” he says, settling down on the other side of the chipped picnic table. He makes careful work of lowering his voice as he pokes around a dollop of whipped cream and digs in with his spoon. “What’s old timer over there got to say?”

“Not much,” Rust says, blinking at the devil trap spinning gently behind Marty’s shoulder before taking a bite of ice cream, sweet pink and always the tagalong memory of baby kisses and Sophia. But it’s good, rich and home-churned and almost gritty with bits of rock salt, and he lets it melt on his tongue before taking another bite to chase down the first, pressing a fresh strawberry up against the roof of his mouth. “Just talking about the weather.”

They eat in easy silence while the old man carves and whittles on, listening to the chimes and patting the old dog when he comes over and rests his head on Marty’s knee, brown eyes sad and wide.

“Good thing we didn’t bring the truck, old boy,” Marty says, gently scratching around the dog’s floppy ears, soft as grey velvet. “I might’ve had half the mind to take you home. Cat’d whip your ass, though.”

“She’d put him in line pretty quick,” Rust says, picking up Marty’s empty ice cream cup and stacking it in his own before getting up to toss them in the trash. “C’mon,” he says as he steps down off the porch, boots crunching in the gravel. “Wanna take a look around.”

Marty gives the dog one last pat and follows in Rust’s footsteps through the dirt lot and across the grass, through a little ditch not yet filled with the summertime runoff and toward the sunflowers until they’re stepping into the shade of a little lean-to shack on the edge of the big field.

Rust touches two fingers to the back of Marty’s elbow and silently leads the way into the thick of them, not bothering to look over his shoulder because he knows he’ll always be followed. He parts gentle through the long stalks towering high above their heads, the biggest of the flowers probably pushing a good seven or eight feet, warm and practically humming with their brown and yellow faces turned toward the afternoon sun.

“These are some hammer-knockers alright,” Marty says in appreciation, nearly bumping headlong into Rust when he comes to a sudden stop. He gets two hands around the other man’s waist to steady himself and lets his voice drop low, watching a pair of ladybugs crawl over the wide leaves of the closest sunflower.

“What’d you bring me all the way in here for?” he asks, eyes drawing up to find Rust’s. “Could see the flowers out there just fine.”

“Didn’t wanna do this out in the open,” Rust says, a little smile playing on the corner of his mouth. And then he leans forward to brush his lips against Marty’s and lets the smell of sweet earth and golden yellow wash over him, bursting like a swill of Tennessee honey when Marty’s tongue pushes into his mouth for a taste.

It’s quiet save for the soft rustle of wind through the fields and the distant cries of blackbirds but they hold onto one another, anchor themselves to the spot and gently sway like one body instead of two. Rust’s arms are braced across Marty’s shoulders and he doesn’t let go when they pull apart for a breath, still close enough that the tips of their noses would brush if they moved the right way. Marty’s hands are laced at the small of his back when his eyes flick up to the fan of yellow petals haloed in a half-moon behind Rust’s head, the lowest of the bunch whispering through his hair.

Marty reaches up without much thought and plucks one petal free, rubs the soft yellow between his fingers and then takes it, drawing the tip gently down the bridge of the other man’s nose. Rust only lowers his lashes and lets him, still breathing soft in the warm space between them.

“We shouldn’t have to let anything ruin this color,” Marty says softly, trailing the petal over the ridge of Rust’s cheek and the tiny scar leftover from the night Wren Dufresne came to their door. “I used to fucking like yellow.”

He lets the petal drop and flutter to the ground and then leans back in, pressing his lips to all the places the yellow had been before. One kiss across the bridge of Rust’s nose, another against the faded split along his cheekbone, and then two more soft and chaste against each of his eyelids.

Marty still surprises himself sometimes with the depth of what he can feel for another man, with the things he thinks and says and does, how it all seems to come like a second nature now.

Rust still surprises him too, maybe, when he only leans closer and lets him.

“Fifty years old today,” Marty says a little hoarsely, clearing his throat and watching Rust’s lashes raise a hair, just enough to see him. “Seems like it should be a long time, but I don’t reckon it ever really feels it.”

“Long enough,” Rust says, eyes lowering to Marty’s mouth. He’s quiet for a moment, listening to the blackbirds and the breeze before his voice comes back. “Can be hard to believe I made it this far, sometimes.”

“Well I’m glad you did,” Marty says softly, because that’s the truth and more. “Every damn day.”

Rust’s eyes flick back up to meet his with a thread of a smile tugging at his mouth, and it pulls harder until Marty catches the barest hint of those pretty white teeth. A small gift every time he gets to see them, though they come and go in the blink of an eye.

“Yeah,” Rust says, looking somewhere out into the thick of the sunflowers. “Me too.”

  


By the time they step back around to the front of the old house the jeep and its occupants have finished their stay and gone. The old man has managed to begin shaping his piece of wood into something more recognizable, though Rust still can’t quite tell what it might be in the end. When his boots touch down on gravel lot the porch door swings wide, and an older woman walks out with a shallow wooden crate wedged against one hip.

Her hair is wrapped up and tied in a silk headscarf but her clothes look more or less like something they’d find in town—linen pants cuffed neatly above the ankles and a light blouse in a soft shade of lilac. She lets the porch door ease shut while her dark eyes dart between the two of them, though they linger the longest on Marty.

“You still interested in taking some of these berries home, shug?” she asks, standing there unmoving on the portico so Marty will come to her. “Think you’d do well with them.”

Marty stomps lightly up the porch stairs to peek at her wares again, getting an eyeful of red-ripe strawberries the size of a child’s fist. “Yes ma’am,” he says, reaching around to pull his wallet from his back pocket. “You said it’s fifteen for the crate, yeah?”

Rust is down by the car, crouched on his heels next to the old farm dog. He has a couple straggling cigarettes left in the glove box but he doesn’t raise up to get them, only scratches easy around the dog’s ears while it pants in the balmy heat.

Marty pulls a couple bills from his wallet and passes them over, and when he holds out his hands to take the strawberry crate the woman’s eyes drop to his palms before flicking back up to his face. “You got time to sit for a spell?” she asks, gaze soft but steady.

“Uh, yeah, I suppose so,” Marty says in a strange tone of voice, glancing Rust’s way and wetting his bottom lip. “Rust, my—my part—”

“I know who he is,” she says gently, smiling a little as she leads them over to settle on a vacant picnic bench. “He’s more than welcome to come up here in the shade if he wants.”

Rust has been watching the exchange without a word and at her cue rises back up to his full height to climb the porch stairs, squint still thrown across his features even in the shade. He sits down next to Marty so their shoulders just barely brush, and the woman’s eyes go straight to his.

“Reckon we three are just as much strangers to one another as three jackrabbits on a full moon, but I guess that’s only split the one way,” she says, pushing the strawberry crate to one side so there’s only open table between them. “You two have known each other for a long time.”

Marty’s brow tightens up but Rust puts his elbows on the table, sleeves rolled up far enough that the woman’s eyes slide along the bird on his arm and then over to the gold band on his left hand. “We have,” he says, blinking at her from under sleepy lids.

“Now how do you know that?” Marty asks, his own fingers laced in front of him on the scarred wood. His mouth has got that particular slant to it, something not lost on their host.

“I don’t often care to catch a read on folks anymore,” she says, pulling a single cigarette and a matchbook from her shirt pocket before lighting up. “Not something that comes to me much, less I let it, but with you two I caught hold of something.” She laughs a little, showing off bright teeth set into a dark face. “Though it don’t take a damn clairvoyant to recognize what y'all got when they see it.”

She draws off a deep pull and holds the cigarette poised between two knuckles, sending violet-tinted smoke up into the afternoon air. Cloves instead of tobacco, judging by the taste of floral spice welling on Rust’s tongue, and he watches her closely, letting their eyes brush again while Marty makes an uncomfortable sort of noise in the back of his throat.

“I’m not any kinda bigot,” she says. “That ain’t none of my business, but I just wanted to let you know—something like that, you don’t see very often anymore. Got a weight to it. Substance.”

Her eyes dart over to Marty and her mouth curls up around the cigarette now hanging between her lips. “A blush like that you could bottle and sell, baby,” she laughs, and Marty’s cheeks only flush darker. “No use being bashful, we both know this one right here would handpick the stars out of the sky for you.”

Marty clears his throat, eyes cut low to Rust’s hand on the table. It takes a moment, something small and fleeting, but then he reaches up and wraps his fingers around two of Rust’s and squeezes the lightest bit, skimming over the back of his hand when he draws away again. “Figure that goes both ways,” he says, and Rust smiles a little at that, peering out across the sunflower fields as another breeze whispers in through the chimes.

“It does,” the woman says, blowing a stream of smoke from the corner of her mouth. “And it’s about time I let you get on to where you were going, but you two have got your garden planted now—tending it’s gonna come easy.”

She stubs out her cigarette on the bottom of one shoe and stands from the table, picking up the crate of strawberries to pass back over to Marty. He takes them and nods to her, a little bit of a bleary fluster still clouded around his features though he smiles all the same.

When she turns and moves closer to Rust he lets her come without a thought, feeling a warm hand rest light over the place where Childress’ hatchet had split into the black feathers on his arm. She leans in and he ducks down to meet her, just enough to hear a voice spun low in his ear. “The things he said to you in that darkness weren’t part of the dream.”

And then she’s stepping back and away, smiling and moving to stand next to the old man still whittling away through the afternoon. “Have a Happy Birthday, now,” she says, giving him a nod as both men crunch through the gravel lot.

Marty stows the strawberries in the back seat and Rust stands by the car, watching the old farm dog slowly stand and make his way back up to sprawl in the shade on the porch. They both slide into their seats without a word and Marty cranks the air up high, though he doesn’t shift yet to back out onto the road, staring hard at a vague spot on the dashboard.

“You told her it was my birthday?” Rust asks, squinting out the windshield to watch the woman slip back through the screen door.

Marty shakes his head and puts the car in reverse, both hands slack on the wheel. “No,” he says, before turning to look over his shoulder and backing away from the old house, thumb brushing the back of Rust’s neck when his hand braces against the passenger seat. “I didn’t.”  


* * *  


They make it into the Baton Rouge city limits with an hour to spare, and when Marty turns off the main drag into a Hilton parking lot five miles from their destination, Rust only looks over at him and waits for an answer.

“Gotta get out of these driving clothes, and I’m not fussing around in a McDonald’s bathroom,” he says with a rogue kind of grin, pulling the keys from the ignition and stepping around back to get their change of clothes from the trunk. “C’mon.”

The hotel lobby is bright and decorated with fresh flowers in anticipation of spring and Marty breezes past the concierge desk without a pause or question, eyes peeled for the enclave holding the first-floor bathroom. It’s toward the back between the elevator and deserted settee lounge, and he peeks over his shoulder at Rust before stepping into the men’s room.

“Handicap one,” Marty says when Rust goes to duck into a stall, nodding toward the back of the restroom past the line of empty urinals. “No need to take up two when I’ve seen what you’re packin plenty, hot shot.”

He slides the lock on the door behind them and then barks out a half-giddy sort of laugh, the sound echoing off the cool tile and marble along the walls. “Be funny if somebody walked in here and thought we were up to something.”

“You suddenly about ten years old there, Marty?” Rust says, already undoing his belt and shucking his jeans down over his hips. “Hand me that duffel so I can get my pants out if you plan on just standing there for a show.”

“Please,” Marty snorts, unzipping the bag and handing Rust’s pants over before toeing his shoes off and thumbing the buttons on his shirt. “Seen better strip teases out of a grandma.”

He watches Rust undress from the corner of his eye anyhow, and when they’re both mostly spiffed up in their slacks and button-downs he closes the space between them, taking both ends of Rust’s tie in his hands.

“I like this tie,” Marty murmurs, pulling the thicker end down and adjusting the length.

“Well, you’re the one who picked it out,” Rust says, sniffing as he watches Marty’s hands through his lashes. “Pretty sure it was yours to start with.”

“Like it on _you_ ,” Marty tells him, looping the dark blue fabric around into a knot that he keeps loose at Rust’s throat. “Look good in some color, when you actually wear it.”

He folds Rust’s collar down and smoothes his hands over his shoulders in a cursory sort of gesture before stepping back, taking in the bigger picture. “Not bad,” he says. “Not too bad at all.”

Rust packs their other clothes and shoes back into the duffel and zips up while Marty wets his hair down in the mirror above the sink, shaking his hands dry to tighten the band on his watch, still just as pretty as it was on Christmas morning.

When he peers back into the mirror Rust’s eyes meet his there from where he’s leaning against the door, ready to head out.

“You look good, Marty,” Rust says to Marty’s reflection, voice pitched low.

“Shit, I bet you say that to all the boys,” Marty says as he turns around, watching Rust unbolt the lock and step back into the bathroom. “You really mean it?”

“I do,” Rust says, holding the door open for Marty to follow him out.  


* * *  
  


The restaurant turns out to be a new steakhouse in the middle of town, bursting at the seams with people and laughter and the telltale sounds of weekend carousing. Even the light-strung wooden deck outside is filled to the brim with couples smoking and sipping their way around ale and cocktails, some of the women glittering in sequined dresses that catch the last few fingers of a sinking sun.

“You call Audrey and Orren to meet us?” Rust asks, looking around the parking lot as they walk together toward the heavy double doors.

“Uh—no, I didn’t,” Marty says, casting him a sidelong glance. “Would you have wanted me to?”

“Wouldn’t have minded,” Rust says. “Just figured you might’ve asked them to come along, seeing how they live nearby.”

“I’ll have to keep that in mind for next time,” Marty says, blinking to himself but smiling as he opens the door for Rust. “After you.”

It’s even louder inside the restaurant and Rust looks around at the people packed into the foyer, idly sipping drinks and chatting while they wait for a table. Marty steps up to the hostess desk and smiles at the pretty brunette with her hair piled on top of her head, gently twisting the ring on his right hand.

“Got a reservation for two under Hart,” he says, clearing his throat a bit. “For 7:00.”

The hostess sticks a purple pen behind her ear and scans through the reservation list written on the book in front of her, running a finger down the page. She gets to the bottom and then turns to check the system on the computer, clicking through the calendar while she talks.

“Are you sure it was today?” she asks, glancing between Marty and the screen. “I’ve looked in the book and the scheduler and we don’t have anything under Hart for tonight.”

“Is today February the eighth?” Marty asks with a short little laugh, brows climbing higher up his forehead. “If I didn’t book for today, I don’t know when the hell else I would’ve done it.”

“I’ll check again,” the hostess says, stepping aside to let her coworker answer the ringing phone while she goes down the list once more. “Is there any other name it would’ve been under?”

“Maybe try Cohle,” Rust says quietly from behind Marty’s shoulder, but the other man just shakes his head.

“No, it was Hart for today, seven sharp, the person I spoke to said they’d put it right in. If it isn’t under that name…” Marty trails off, making a vague sort of gesture with his hand before letting it fall against the countertop.

The brunette looks up with her bottom lip caught between her teeth and shakes her head. “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s not in here. We’re totally booked for the night—something must’ve gone wrong with the reservation.”

Marty draws in a deep breath and blows it out even, looking somewhere past the hostess while his fingers drum on the underside of the counter. “How long would we have to wait without a reservation?” he asks, meeting her eyes. “Mix-up like this, seems like you folks could somehow accommodate a smaller party.”

“Hold on just a second,” the woman says, and scurries off with her coworker left standing awkwardly on the phone. A few moments later she’s leading a bright-eyed man back to the front before stepping to the side, busying herself with seating the next group of patrons.

“Apologies for the misunderstanding,” the man says, and when he steps forward the brassy tag clipped to his shirtfront identifies him as the manager. “I’m sorry to say but we’re a full house tonight—most everybody out on the veranda is waiting for a table to boot, and without a reservation it’s first-come, first-serve. You’re welcome to stick around, but it’s looking like a two-hour wait or longer.”

Rust watches the tension in Marty’s shoulders and wonders if he’s going to have to drag him into the parking lot, press a hand to his chest and steer the both of them away from what might be teetering hard on becoming a scene. But Marty only presses his mouth into a tightened smile and nods to the manager, one hand tucked into his pocket. “Obliged,” he says, only barely audible over the din of the restaurant. “We were trying to celebrate a birthday, but it looks like we’re headed elsewhere.”

The manager goes to say something else but Marty turns and walks through the throng of people standing by the entrance, and Rust waits for him to clear the path before he slowly makes to follow.

Out in the parking lot, Marty’s jaw is wound tight enough to splinter and crack, and when they happen upon a stray rock from the garden planters out front he winds up and kicks it across the pavement until it pings off the rubber of somebody’s truck tire.

“Better be glad you didn’t just scratch their paint,” Rust drawls from a few steps away, and Marty blows out a snorting kind of sigh as they get back to the Cadillac.

“How you know I wasn’t aiming to do just that?” he asks, leaning back heavily against the passenger side of the car to wipe a hand around his mouth. “Listen, you got a cigarette or two squirreled away somewhere? I could sure as shit use one right now.”

“No,” Rust lies, even though he knows there are three tucked in an old carton under the registration and tire gauge in the glove compartment. He leans against the side of the car next to Marty and tips his head back to watch a small flock of starlings light on the nearest power line, tiny bodies silhouetted black against orange dusk.

“You don’t need to be upset, Marty,” he says after a few moments, squinting across the parking lot as he reaches up to pull his tie a bit looser. “I’m not.”

Marty dips his head and cuts his eyes over, though his shoulders go lax and drop. “Well, I wouldn’t blame you if you were. A whole day’s worth of plans gone down the shitter one piss at a time.”

“Don’t know about that,” Rust says, easy enough. “How do you figure this isn’t the best birthday I’ve had in…hell, probably looking at thirty fucking years.”

Their eyes meet for a second, blue on blue, and Rust is surprised when Marty looks away with a wavering sigh. “Shouldn’t be that way,” he says, one hand coming up to scratch at the corner of his eye. “Fuck, Rust. When you say shit like that, I—”

“Not saying it to make you feel bad,” Rust says, shifting a little so they’re pressed together, shoulder to thigh. “Just saying it like it is, and that I reckon I’ve had a pretty good birthday so far.”

“Jesus,” Marty laughs. “The cat giving me hell all morning, the observatory cancelling—” He throws a look over his shoulder toward the steakhouse with a toss of his hand. “—then this goddamn place fucking us over, should’ve fucking called to check this morning—”

“We’ve both seen plenty rougher road, man,” Rust tells him. “Cat didn’t hamper you too much, if memory serves, and we’ve got the whole rest of the year to look at the stars. Just took a detour, is all. Even got our fuckin fortune told.”

Marty snorts and shakes his head, drawing the toe of his shoe across the pavement. “You don’t take stock in that shit.”

“Not especially,” Rust says. “Maybe sometimes, when the cards fall right.”

“Come to think of it, what’d she say to you when we were leaving?” Marty asks. “Whatever it was, I couldn’t hear.”

Rust hums a little to himself, absently running his hand over his stomach, thinking about a different one resting there some time ago. “Nothing I didn’t already know,” he says.

Marty looks back up to find Rust’s eyes on his mouth, heavy-lidded but soft in the waning light. “But I’ve had a damn good day,” he says, quiet, and then leans the rest of the way in to press his lips against the corner of Marty’s mouth. “With you.”

Rust pulls away and Marty feels the balled-up mess of agitation in his gut soften, unwind and mellow into something else while a mild flush burns at the tips of his ears. There’s a couple walking past them toward the entrance, likely saw the whole thing but he doesn’t care, only raises two fingers and smiles as the woman nods back and hooks her arm into the crook of her man’s elbow.

“Night ain’t over yet,” Rust says after a few beats of silence. “Sure we could figure out something else to do for dinner.”

“It’s your birthday, babe,” Marty says, jingling the keys in his pocket. “Point the way.”

Rust looks back up at the chattering starlings and the moment he blinks they all take flight in unison, one grey cloud flitting together toward the darker part of the sky. Marty watches them go, too, and when they’re gone Rust bumps into his shoulder a bit, a small thread of a smile tugging around his mouth alongside an older memory.

“Think of something?” Marty asks, eyes tracing over the lines of Rust’s face.

“Maybe,” Rust tells him, gently pushing off the car. “We haven’t had Thai food in a real long time.”

  


There’s a little neon-lit restaurant on the road back to Lafayette, and they pull their ties off and roll up their sleeves before finding an empty table booth inside. Rust hasn’t touched Thai in a decade but Marty’s had his fair share and more, spinning out a few stories about the things he’d tried during the time he spent dating that Filipino woman a handful of years back.

“What was her name?” Rust asks, pushing rice noodles around his plate while Marty sips on a diet soda straight from the can, brows raising a hair at the question. “The Filipino girl.”

“Uh—Iya,” Marty says, sitting back in his chair. He wads up the napkin in his lap and tosses it on the finished plate of chicken curry between them on the table, gaze cast somewhere up on the wall. “Wasn’t meant to last. She was younger than me—not too much younger, mind you, but young enough to still want a couple kids. And by that point…”

Marty trails off, clearing his throat a little before dropping his eyes back down to Rust. “Already had my two girls, grown as they were. Didn’t want to—well, y’know. Big commitment at that age.”

The waitress swings by the table and picks up their empty plates, setting the check down in her wake, and once she’s gone Rust brings one hand up to his mouth, chewing on the edge of a thumbnail.

“I ever tell you,” he says, letting his hand drop back into his lap before he goes on. “That Laurie wanted a baby.”

“Laurie—Laurie, doctor Laurie?” Marty murmurs while he gets his wallet out, as if there’d been any other Laurie in Rust’s life worth mentioning. “A baby with you?”

“Mmhmm,” Rust hums, picking apart his napkin while he bites against the sudden craving for a cigarette. “Took that as my cue to bow out.”

Marty pulls a card out of his wallet and sets it on top of the check at the edge of the table. “Jesus, man,” he says. “Here I’d been thinking she just got tired of your ass smoking in the house.”

“Sure that didn’t help,” Rust says with a low sigh, setting the ruined napkin down on the table. “She wasn’t too interested in my reasoning at the time. Can’t really blame her—wasn’t something I wanted to hold out like an open book, you know, and the relationship suffered for it. But by then I’d long since come to terms with my failings as a father.”

Somebody steps inside and the bell jingles above the glass door, though neither man turns to watch as they pick up a paper takeout bag off the counter.

“Yeah,” Marty sighs after a few moments, running a palm over the back of his neck. “I hear that.”

The waitress swings by to pick up the check and Marty watches Rust drag a finger through a ring of condensation pooled on the table. He blinks when something touches a thought in his head, mumbling a quiet thank-you when their receipt and his card get pressed back into his hand.

“But why the hell are we even talking about this shit on your birthday?” he asks, scooting back from the table and standing. “Need to get on home and dig into that cake before midnight, sweeten you up a little bit.”

“Thought I was already sweet enough,” Rust drawls, pushing his chair in before leading the way out.

“Maybe,” Marty says, resting a hand against the small of Rust’s back as they step through the door into the chilled night air. “I’ll be the judge of that.”  
  


* * *  


Ghost is sprawled out on her back between two cushions on the couch when they step in through the garage, both of her hind feet sticking up in the air like a toppled jackrabbit.

Marty sets their crate of strawberries down, drops his keys on the coffee table and stands there with one hand hitched up on his hip. “Well?” he says, getting a faint little meow by way of reply when she blinks her eyes open. “Good thing we ain’t a couple robbers, coming in here to clean the house out. So you can just keep comfortable.”

“She knows when it’s us coming home,” Rust says from the kitchen, pulling open the fridge door to hoist the cake box out. “Now get on over here and do whatever you gotta do so we can eat a piece of this.”

“What, you want me to sing for you?” Marty snorts, turning on his heel to breeze into the kitchen and dig around the utensil drawer for a long knife. “Ain’t got any birthday candles—maybe we can light a cigarette, put that on top instead.”

Marty turns the box on the counter and slowly lifts the lid off, peeking in at the cake inside. “Beautiful,” he says with a little pinch of humor rattling in his voice, reaching in to take it out. “Might just shed a tear.”

It’s a little round cake, just big enough to serve four, iced in a thin layer of white with a splash of caramel drizzled around the edges. Rust eyeballs it for a moment and then looks up at Marty with a soft smile on his lips. “I don’t reckon it’ll take more than one guess to figure out what that is.”

“Well, I do know what you like,” Marty murmurs, carefully cutting a wedge and setting it on a plate. He forks off a bite and holds it between them, watching Rust lean in. “Open up.”

Rust lets the cake melt on his tongue, vanilla and sweet caramel and just a touch of salt. “Yep,” he says, humming a little as he watches Marty cut off another piece. “That’s the stuff.”

“Just got a small one for the two of us,” Marty says, taking his own bite. “Don’t need to go and jeopardize your figure.”

Rust doesn’t say anything, though his eyes idly trace over the lines of Marty’s body, camouflaged some by his untucked dress shirt but still there, tightened up and firmer than he remembers seeing in a long time. The softness of his stomach would still be there if Rust reached out and touched it, but only just barely anymore, something he only catches a real glimpse of when Marty’s dropping his towel after a shower, something left when he reaches around in the mornings and presses his hand there while Marty snuffles in his sleep and scoots back against him.

He thinks about that, some. About morning walks and wind chimes shaped like the stars and the promise of planting a garden, and the hard road they both took to get there. Marty in that newfound state of i-n-g for himself, but boiled down to the heart of it all, he’s been doing just as much for Rust.

They aren’t quite done with their cake but Rust steals a drink from Marty’s glass of milk before he stands up and reaches behind the toaster, plugging in the FM radio sitting there on the counter. It’s a battered relic he remembers seeing in the Hart’s garage a lifetime or two ago, sticking out like a sore thumb in the company of sleeker appliances scattered through the kitchen.

“What you turning that old thing on for?” Marty says, setting his fork down to thumb around his mouth. “It’s gettin late.”

Rust adjusts the antenna and fiddles with the dial for a few moments, turning it slowly past louder stations and commercials until he lands on something softer. There’s a thread of static in the sound and he gently jimmies the antenna a bit to the left until it disappears, filling the front part of the house with low music.

He turns back around and their eyes meet. It’s not dark in the house but only the one light above the sink is burning, soft yellow pooling with the white moonlight pouring in from the window. The corner of Marty’s mouth is turned up into a bare brush of a shy-looking smile but he isn’t flushed, standing there with one hip canted easy against the counter.

“C’mon,” Rust says over the music, closing the distance between them so he can take Marty’s hands in his, gently steering him backwards into the living room. They’ve both kicked their shoes off and their socks whisper along the carpet, feet careful to keep from stepping on one another.

Rust drops one hand down to Marty’s hip and laces their fingers together in the other. There’s warmth and the spicy smell of Marty’s cologne and he leans forward to nose into it while they sway against one another, not so much dancing as just moving together in matched time.

Marty’s voice comes soft in Rust’s ear, his free hand sliding down to settle in the dip of his side. “Wish I would’ve gotten you a real present,” he says, the next few words pressing against the side of Rust’s throat when Marty bows his head to murmur them there. “Something nice.”

“Don't need anything nice,” Rust tells him, holding onto Marty a little tighter as one song fades into the next. “Already got everything I want right here."

His heart speeds up a little bit when he says it, but then Marty’s lifting his head to peer crossways into Rust’s eyes, something soft gleaming there. “You been watching those chick movies again?” he asks a little hoarsely, and then leans in to kiss him full on the mouth, chaste but lingering and heavy.

Rust breaks the kiss when he smiles, laughing warmly there against Marty’s cheek.

“What?” Marty asks, halfway dazed, and then lets out a little hoot when Rust spins them around in swinging circle, hips pressed flush together with their hands still threaded tight.

Their lips meet quick and crooked at the height of the circle and Marty’s snorting in Rust’s arms, flushed pink now with the gap between his teeth shining. “Happy Birthday,” he says as they slow back down to a gentle sway, eyes cast low while he builds up to a softer question. “You make a wish today?”

“Not yet,” Rust says, smiling despite himself. “What’s a good one, you think?”

“Not my call,” Marty says. “Though I seem to remember last year, something about wanting a hot hooker and suitcase full of blow.”

“Change of plans,” Rust says, leaning back in to press another kiss against Marty’s mouth. “Maybe got my mind set on something else.”  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I ain't dead yet. Came close a few times while I was getting graduated from university this past month, but we've pulled through and the story continues. The Domestic Rednecks in Love Show isn't over yet, folks. Five more chapters to go!
> 
> Speaking of rednecks in love, a very belated Happy Birthday to Rust, who I've made a February baby for the purpose of this story. Why did I do it? Well, a lot of people tend to headcanon him as a Scorpio (which I can agree with as well!), but if you look up the astrological compatibility of Leo (Marty's birthday in this story is August 21st) and Aquarius, it's pretty damn staggering in terms of reflecting a certain duo's relationship dynamic. So February 8th it is.
> 
> This fic turned a year old on March 23rd and I couldn't be happier with the warmth and happiness it has helped bring into my life. You guys are undeniably a huge part of that, and I really can't thank you enough for all the amazing feedback and support you've given me. Back in March I wrote an anniversary special of sorts, [a constant upward glance](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3607803), which features some ~outtakes of a sort from this story, or simply scenes I skipped out on writing the first go-around. I do hope you like it. ♥


	30. hurricane

"Well hey, Bobby!" Marty crows into the phone bright and early on Saturday morning, canted up against the sun-filled kitchen sink with the gap between his teeth shining. “Great to hear from you, man, it’s been a good long while. How’d that bottle of Macallan hold up?”

Rust’s eyes flick up from the newspaper while he swirls the last few mouthfuls of coffee around the bottom of his cup, watching Marty shift his weight over onto one hip and slide a thumb down under the waistband of his boxers to chase an invisible itch.

“Uh, no, can’t say I’ve been doing much writing lately,” Marty half-laughs, his voice shifting into something else so slight and sudden anybody else would’ve missed it. “But hell, that can’t be what you called to talk about.”

There’s an indistinct murmur droning on the other end of the line for a few moments, loud enough to make out over the hum of the running dryer in the next room. Rust sets his mug back down and the paper aside to watch Marty’s face, his lips silently mouthing out an occasional word as it comes through the earpiece, light brows scrunched up a little in something like vague consternation. His eyes dart up to Rust’s after a moment and he clears his throat, reaching up to palm his neck with his free hand in a gesture Rust knows all too well.

“Yeah, he’s still living with me,” Marty says. “Has been since we walked out of that place. Will be for the long run—least until we kill one another, I reckon.” The last part was meant to be threaded like a joke, something the Marty of fifteen years ago might’ve said to Demma or Campbell in the station break room while he stirred cheap sugar packets into his coffee with a sigh, but here and now his voice dips odd at one tail-end, rising up half an octave. Something he didn’t believe in, the truth loitering around the edges and masquerading as something else.

Until we kill one another, Marty’d said. _Until we die_ , Rust hears in a different voice.

But then Marty’s laughing his good ole’ boy laugh, blinking fast and leaning back against the sink so a strip of sunlight cuts across one shoulder. “Let me ask him,” he says, and presses the phone against his chest to keep the other end from hearing.

“Bobby Lutz has got himself a new boat and wants to take her fishing, invited me along for the ride.” He stalls for a fleeting moment, just enough time for Rust to wonder how and why Marty’s kept in touch with Lutz after all this time, things they might’ve done or said in the eight years he was too far north to bend his ear and listen. “Wanted to know if you’re interested in coming out too.”

Rust blinks and picks his coffee back up even though it’s gone mostly stone-cold and takes a long swig before he answers. “Tropical storm’s coming down the pipeline tonight sometime and Bobby Lutz wants to go fishing.”

“He’s offering, man, and you know you can borrow a pole. Shit, I’ll go out and get you one right now.”

“He know we’re together, Marty?” Rust asks, simple and straightforward without anything tacked onto the side, and Marty gives an aborted little half-shake of his head like he forgot how to do it mid-action, teeth sunk down into his bottom lip.

“No,” he sighs after a long second of silence, and that’s not a surprise. “But I guess he’ll figure it out.”

Rust watches him, draws out a slow blink and then drops his eyes back down to the abandoned paper, rereading the headline about levees getting braced down in New Orleans. The black print is wedged there between the second and third fingers of his left hand, bordered on one side by a crescent moon of gold. “Alright,” he says, leaving the rest unspoken.

“Bobby?” Marty checks when he puts the phone back up against his ear, fingers scratching through the stubble along his jaw. “What time you want us out there in the morning?”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Rust has always known a calm sky to be a painted fraud in one form or another, and this morning above the lake it’s rife with deceit, as picturesque and pure blue as any stockroom watercolor he’s seen bolted to an institution wall inside the lower forty-eight.

He watches it while he and Marty swing down out of the truck, hauling a set of poles and Marty’s old tackle box out of the bed. A storm is whipping up hell in the gulf and will kiss the coastline in twelve hours but for now the water lies still, reflecting the white faces of sunning cottonmouth clouds.

The boat trailer is already angled into the water and Bobby Lutz makes his presence known by  dragging the toe of one shoe across the pavement on approach, stepping around his truck and pushing his mirrored sunglasses up on his head. Marty turns first with a laugh already bursting forth like it’s old custom, leaning in to clap him on the shoulder while his tackle box thuds against one hip, and Bobby blinks a few times in the sunlight before his eyes swivel to find Rust.

He moves forward in a half-step, hand brought up in an offering he holds out on a reflex Rust doesn’t mirror. A water coot laughs high and loud from the reeds and he lets its chuckle quiet and taper out before he’s smoothly shifting the poles to one fist, reaching out and taking Bobby’s hand in a firm grip.

“Rust Cohle,” Bobby says, like he never thought he’d say the two words strung together ever again, a novelty spoken with a disbelieving tongue. “It’s been a long damn time. Where you been holed up the past ten years?”

“Alaska, mostly,” Rust says, dropping his hand and falling back next to Marty. His eyes flick over the hull of the fishing boat, painted pristine white and silver and polished to a high shine. “Nice boat you got here.”

Bobby laughs a little, reaching up to scratch under his chin. “Well, she’s pretty for now, but we’ll see how she fares after the storm tonight.” He pushes his sunglasses back down as he walks over to the trailer, checking something on the hitch. “Whatever happened to that boat you had, Marty? Steve Geraci said it was real nice the one time y’all took it out.”

Marty’s mouth screws up for a split second before leveling out even. “Oh, that old thing?” he asks, waving his hand through the air. “I, uh—had to let it go. Nice offer came in from a guy I never met, had been looking for one like it for weekend trips. Sold it off it him.”

“That so?” Bobby asks, and Rust’s eyes flick easy between them, searching for a slipped hand to show. But then Bobby’s stepping around the trailer to eyeball the loading dock, hitching his fingers up on his hips. “Well,” he says, “you ever want something new to play with, give me a shout. I got stuff coming through the garage all the time.”

“Will do,” Marty says, and Rust can't be sure if he saw him wink in the glinting daylight or not.

  
  
 * * *  
  
  


“The breeze out here ain’t hardly more than a baby’s breath, how the hell do our lines keep gettin' snagged?”

“Huh,” Rust says, sitting spread-legged in a lawn chair with the butt of his pole jammed in the crease of one thigh. He’s holding it one-handed, a half empty beer bottle sweating away in the other, and squints off into the water with the unconcerned expression of a seasoned safari guide watching a lioness tear into a zebra.

Bobby walks back out from the cabin and goes to jimmy his rod, trying to yank his line away from Rust’s where they’re crossing in the water. Two tugs pulls it free and then he’s heading for an opposite corner of the stern with a mumbled word or two, reeling back and casting further off before plunking down in his empty chair.

“I see you over there,” Marty says from where he’s sitting angled away from Rust, murmuring low against the lip of his beer. “Casting into Bobby’s line.”

“Wind must’ve done that,” Rust says, taking a long pull off his bottle before setting it down on the deck. Marty snorts and tests his line some, looking back up quick when he hears a metallic clink he could clock coming up out of a dead sleep.

“Where the hell do you keep hiding those things?” he asks, watching Rust hold a flame to the cigarette caught between his teeth. “Every time I think you’ve finally given it up, you start conjuring smokes like fucking Houdini.”

Rust pockets the lighter and shakes his head, sucking off a long draw before blowing smoke back into the open air. “Houdini was primarily an escape artist,” he says, rolling the cigarette to the corner of his mouth. “You ever heard of Chung Ling Soo?”

“Sure as shit haven’t,” Marty says, slouching back in his chair with a grunt.

“Real name was William Ellsworth Robinson,” Rust says, flicking ash over the side of the boat. “American illusionist, held face as a Chinese magician until the night he took a bullet to the lung and fell offstage. Didn’t blow his act ‘til he was bleeding out in the dirt.”

Marty perks up quick when he sees his line start to strain and pull, getting a firmer grip around his rod and reel. “I’ll never understand how you know all this bizarre shit and still can’t remember to put the flag up on the mailbox. So how the fuck did he get shot?”

“He was killed when the stunt went wrong,” Rust says, exhaling a stream of smoke and stretching one leg out, boot heel scraping across the deck. “Trying to catch a bullet.”

“Who was trying to catch a fucking bullet?” Bobby asks, walking up behind Marty to watch him start reeling something in, the end of his fishing pole bowing and tugging hard. “Shit, you got something big on there, Marty.”

“He’s fightin me pretty good,” Marty says, standing up from his chair and reeling in faster now. “There gar in this lake? I don’t wanna haul in something that’s gonna eat us alive.”

Bobby snaps open their cooler full of lake water and picks up his scoop net, watching the water and waiting for something to skim the surface. “Keep bringing it in,” he says. “Let’s see what you got for the first catch of the day.”

There’s a splash a few yards from the boat and a fat-bodied bass glints olive in the sun, twisting around before it dives back under again. Marty reels it in the rest of the way and when they pull the fish above water, its open mouth is gaping wide, snagged deep with the hook and trying to suck in water.

“Well, you got yourself a damn nice big mouth,” Bobby says, scooping it up in the net, and he goes to try and unhook it off the line but Rust is a little faster, standing and reaching down to take the fish’s wriggling body in hand. One quick slide and pull and the hook comes free in his fingers and with a blink and a wet plop Bobby drops it right into the cooler.

“Guess you’re more of a fisherman than you were letting on before, Cohle,” Bobby says, twirling the net between his fingers like a baton, swinging it around one time. He watches Rust take one last drag off his cigarette before dropping it down the neck of his beer bottle, wiping both hands down the thighs of his jeans.

“Don’t let him fool you,” Marty murmurs, already re-baiting his hook and casting out. “This one here can strip an engine block just as soon as he’d bake a cake.”

“That so?” Bobby asks, a hint of teeth flashing under his mustache. “You do a lot of scratch baking in your spare time?”

Rust drops down into his abandoned chair and picks his pole back up, resuming the same lazy position from before. “Not a whole lot,” he says, squinting at a cormorant as its sleek neck pokes up into the sunlight, black as an oil slick. “Made Marty’s birthday cake last year.”

Bobby snorts and shakes his head, like the idea by itself is the punchline of a joke. “You’re a lot funnier than I remember, Cohle,” he says, picking up his beer and disappearing back inside the cabin.

“Oh, he’s gonna know all right,” Rust drawls a few moments later, not waiting long for the strangled sound Marty makes in the back of his throat.

“Lord,” Marty says, bracing one elbow against his knee to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Preserve me.”  
  
  
  
  
  


A few bolts of lightning fray and splinter far off in the southern sky at midafternoon, spreading like cracks in blue porcelain as they stretch and roll westward. Rust watches the distant horizon thread together like spider webbing for a few long seconds and almost wants to ask Marty if he sees it too, but the other man is staring down into his lap, glancing at his phone screen before pulling his sunglasses back down over his eyes. When he looks up again the lightning is already gone, silk strands spun loose in the distant sky.

“You alright?” is what Marty asks, though, setting his fishing rod aside to stand from his chair. The sun is still shining bright where they are and Rust feels two hands settle on either shoulder and gently squeeze, thumbs massaging into the tight muscle at the base of his neck.

“Yeah,” Rust says, dipping his head to one side so Marty will press harder into the tension there. “Was watching the storm move.”

“We don’t have to do much worrying yet, least not ‘til late tonight,” Marty says, looking out across the lake. “Bobby’ll probably be steering back toward shore soon enough, get this boat tucked in for the long haul.”

Rust tips his head back so it rests against the middle of Marty’s stomach, letting his eyes slowly drip shut. Familiar fingers comb soft through the sun-warmed waves on top of his head and he almost forgets that they aren’t alone, for a moment, until a throat clears behind them and Marty’s hand falls away from his hair.

“Uh, hey,” Bobby says, coughing slight as he raps his knuckles on the cabin’s doorframe, and Rust wonders if they’ll be heading back home sooner than expected after all. “Y’all feel like eating something? Got some sandwiches in the fridge in here.”

“Sure thing,” Marty says, patting Rust once on the shoulder before turning around, and there’s a light flush on his cheeks that doesn’t have much to do with the sun. “Let me give you a hand real quick.”

Bobby gives a little shrug and a nod and leads the way back inside, stepping down below in the galley where there’s a tiny fridge tucked up under the counter. He stoops to pull a couple deli sandwiches out, the brown butcher paper they’re wrapped in making the only sound inside the small room.

“Is there something—something going on that I ain’t exactly caught wind of yet?” Bobby asks, meeting Marty’s eye for just a second before he looks back down at the sandwiches. “Between, uh—you and Cohle.”

Marty’s mulled this conversation over in his head a thousand and one times since the morning Rust planted one on him in the parking lot of a rechristened Hart & Cohle Investigative Solutions. Every time with a different face, a different approach, a different outcome. Sometimes there’s a fight, sometimes he wins and sometimes he goes home bloody. Other times he can almost see the way the string of a twenty-year friendship snaps when he reaches up and cuts through it clean as softened butter, keeping Rust held close and firm on his side of the line. Sometimes he has to turn around and not look back.

But he’s not quite expecting this, this softly awkward question while he’s standing down in the galley of Bobby Lutz’s fishing boat, one old colleague at his elbow and Rustin Cohle wearing a gold band on his finger sitting above on the sunlit deck.

They’re here now, in the truth of it. And Marty’s got a pretty good idea of who he is.

“Yeah, Bobby, something’s going on,” he finally sighs, reaching out to pull a bag of potato chips across the counter. “It’s been going on for a while. I told you we’d been living together since Rust got out of the hospital—the first time, anyhow. We…well, we just never did quit.”

Bobby sets the sandwiches back down and Marty watches his palms press flat on the stainless steel, wedding ring clinking there against the cold metal. The other man’s eyes drop right to his left hand like an anchor and Marty hears his next words before they even touch air.

“I saw he had a ring on his finger but I guess I didn’t…well, my first thought wasn’t—damn, you know what I’m saying.” Bobby laughs to himself, a little too forced and airy in the galley. “What the fuck, man. Are you serious?”

“You think Rust would go along with a joke like that?” Marty asks, trying on a small smile that flattens back out before it chooses to waver instead, matching the uneasy flutter somewhere up in the softness behind his ribcage. Bobby catches his eye again and the answer’s spelled out clear enough there, he reckons. Anybody who caught him watching Rust long enough could put two and two together without needing a map to get there.

A water bird from somewhere topside calls out, breaking into the quiet. Bobby’s hand comes up to run through his hair, pushing back all the questions he won’t ask about bloody knuckles and parking lots and how Geraci and the boys had pegged Rust for queer his first week on the job back in ’94 without ever putting a finger on a reason why.

“Well I’ll be damned,” he says, picking the sandwiches back up. There’s another stretch of silence and then he’s gesturing for Marty to grab the chips and make his way back up the galley stairs.

“Are—are you happy?” Bobby asks, clearing his throat. “With how things are, I mean.”

Marty nods once, laughing softly to himself, and whether it’s from relief or too much sun or something else entirely, he doesn’t rightly know. “Yeah,” he says, because that’s the truth. “Suppose I am.”

He’s already stepping back onto the deck again when Bobby’s voice comes from behind, low but loud enough for Rust to catch where he’s sunning in his chair, stripped down to his undershirt now with the afternoon light making his grey-licked hair shine like tarnished gold.

“That’s real good,” Bobby says, dragging his chair over before passing two sandwiches off to Marty. He unwraps his own and stares at it in his lap for a long moment before looking back up, not quite looking either man in the eye when he speaks. “Well,” he says, slanted a little in Marty’s direction. “How’s that grandbaby of yours doing?”

“Little Miss Lilah,” Marty says with a smile, dropping down into the folding chair next to Rust. “Gettin’ bigger and more beautiful every day. She’ll be a year old come July.”

“Imagine she’ll start walking soon,” Rust says, busy looking elsewhere when two pairs of eyes snap over his way.

“Walk?” Marty scoffs, taking a swig of bottled water while Bobby glances between them. “She just barely started crawling a couple weeks ago, seems like. What makes you think she’ll be walking in two months?”

Rust takes the sandwich Marty hands over and slides his thumb under the paper but doesn’t open it yet, reaching around to palm his phone from his back pocket. He shields the screen from the sun while he pulls something up, then leans in and passes it over. “Forgot to show you that,” he says. “Audrey sent it.”

Marty peers at the photo of little Lilah balancing on Audrey’s knees and lets his face split into a wide grin. “Take a gander at that,” he crows, holding out the phone for Bobby to look. “She’s as strong as a little ox.”

“Taking after you and Maggie, she’ll be walking by her birthday out of sheer hardheadedness,” Rust says, mouth twitching a little when he takes his phone back.

Bobby looks between the two of them again, at the quiet little smile shining on Rust’s face, and goddamn if he doesn’t look ten years younger here and now than when he stepped on the boat. Marty’s watching him from the corner of his eye, scratching along the side of his nose in a lame attempt to hide what’d be plain as blue-bright day to anybody looking.

They make an odd sight, ten years out from how he remembers them moving and talking together, but even then there’d been an electric current rippling between them like heat lightning.

Maybe it’d been for a different reason, back then, but there isn’t a thing about it now that doesn’t ring honest or true.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The rest of the afternoon wears on in cast lines and shared talk just as easy as anything, the kind of shit without any real rhyme or reason to it, and Marty’s glad for it all when they finally turn and head back toward the marina with the sun hanging off at a lower angle in the western sky. Rust stands off to one side watching the passing shoreline, smoking one last cigarette with his unbuttoned shirt whipping around in the breeze.

“Little more successful than our last boating trip,” Marty says with a grin, leaning against the railing next to Rust. “Actually got some fishing done this time.”

“A bit,” Rust says, blowing a thin stream of smoke from the corner of his mouth. He doesn’t cut his eyes toward the cabin where Bobby’s driving, only lets them flicker over Marty’s face. “He took to it better than I thought.”

“Yeah, well it would’ve been two on one in a fishing boat in the middle of a lake,” Marty says quietly, watching Rust ash his cigarette with a strange cast to his eyes. “Bobby knows better than to piss you off, I think.”

“Maybe,” Rust says, shifting his weight over onto one hip. “Or he’s interested in hanging onto an old friend no matter the baggage you happen to tote along.”

Marty snorts and slaps his hands against his thighs, shaking his head. “Don’t you even start with that shit,” he says. “And if that’s the case, at least he kept his mouth shut enough that you didn’t have such a bad time yourself.”

“What matters to me is that you had a good time,” Rust says, peering at Marty with the crow’s feet around his eyes pulled tight in a squint. His hair’s getting longer on top again, a few loose waves blowing around messy in the wind, and in a few more days he’ll take a trip into town to get them cropped off short.

“I did,” Marty answers after a moment, watching the marina finally come back into view. He reaches up and scratches along his cheek, the greying stubble there lighter in the sun. “Was good to get out with one of the boys we hadn’t seen in a while.”

Rust reaches up quick to gently brush one fingertip down Marty’s jawline, something he feels in his gut like a softened rattlesnake strike.

“You trying to overcompensate with a beard?” Rust asks, the humor of it hanging soft on his lips.

“No,” Marty says, though he reaches up to rub his palm over the whiskers, trying to mask the flush burning at his throat. “Was wondering if you’d mind, though. Uh—me trying something different.”

Rust’s eyes narrow a bit as he leans back against the railing. “It’s your face, Marty. Do what you want.”

“Well,” Marty laughs, shrugging a little. “Who’s been kissing who here, slick? If you don’t like it I’d just as soon get rid of it.”

“Let’s see, then,” Rust says, whistling soft around the hard s’s, taking Marty’s face in one hand as he leans in closer to press a kiss soft against his lips before following up with another at the scratchy corner of his mouth. He hums against Marty’s skin and then pulls back, standing there looking just as loose-limbed and easy as anything.

“Not bad,” Rust says. “I ain’t filing any complaints.”

“No more of that ‘til we get home,” Marty mumbles, a little dazed under the weight of Rust’s heavy eyes, sun-blinded in a way that has nothing to do with the sky. “Bobby might see and crash the fucking boat.”

  
  
  


Back on land with the trucks packed and loaded, Bobby doesn’t shake their hands again, but he stands close enough that their shadows crisscross on the pavement.

“You two take care of yourselves,” he says, waving off as he goes to swing up into his truck. “Good seeing you, Marty. And Rust—” he adds after a lingering second, like the name had been cleaved in half midair without Cohle tacked onto the end of it. “Both more than welcome to come out anytime, just give me a holler.”

“We’ll be in touch,” Marty says, and it isn’t until after they’re two miles down the road that he screws up his mouth and barks out a harsh laugh.

“What?” Rust asks, steering the truck off to the exit that’ll take them home.

“Come out anytime, he says,” Marty murmurs, rubbing his fingers into his eyes as he laughs again. “Fuckin’ A.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The sky is already dark before dusk hits, bruised with deep watercolor shades of plum and indigo storm. Marty keeps the weather channel running in the living room when he steps out onto the back porch and unfolds a stepladder carried from the garage. The wind feels damp against his skin while he unhooks the wind chimes Rust gave him from their wooden beam, the moon and glass stars spinning and clinking together in the breeze.

Rust walks barefoot through the sliding door and stands on the cool concrete, silhouetted dark by the yellow lamplight bleeding from the house behind him. He holds out a flat shirt box lined with newspaper and Marty eases the chimes down into it, making sure none of the shapes clatter too roughly while he lays them flat.

“Anything else you wanna bring in?” Rust murmurs, looking out across the yard. The frogs are singing loud while they wait for rain, briefly drowned out by a low moan of thunder that rumbles from behind the horizon.

Marty shakes his head and motions for Rust to lead the way back inside. “Should be all set except for your truck. Hope it don’t come up a hailstorm in the middle of the night, because there ain’t room for a wayward breath in that garage.”

“I’m not worried,” Rust says, stepping back into the living room where carpet is soft under his feet. The weatherman is pointing out bands of red and yellow swirling like higher circles of hell on the TV screen, winding up to pop the coastline within the next two hours. “It’s seen and survived a lot worse.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Rust wakes up flush naked and uncovered in the pitch-dark, which normally wouldn’t be anything unusual save for the fact that he’s sweating and Marty’s busy kicking the sheet down the bed in a fit of heat-fueled anger, halfway swearing in his sleep.

He knows right away that the electricity is dead, the room gone oddly still and black around them. It’s howling away outside though and rain is beating against the window in torrents, coming down hard enough to make the ground thunder like a big earthen drum.

“Marty,” Rust says, reaching over to find him through the dark. “The electricity’s out.”

“No fucking kidding,” Marty mumbles, though he stops struggling with the blankets and lays there limp as a ragdoll for a moment, blowing out a heavy sigh. “Shit, we gotta go crank up the generator, get some candles going. What time is it?”

He pulls his phone off the nightstand and thumbs on the lock screen, the fluorescent glow casting blue across his face while he checks the time. “3:42 in the morning,” he says, absently rubbing one eye before letting the screen thump against his chest. “God bless Louisiana.”

Rust finds a pair of what turns out to be Marty’s boxers in the dark, shuts the drawer anyhow and pulls them up over his hips, folding the waistband down once so they fit a little snugger. He’s standing up from the bed when Marty grunts to himself, one hand sliding across the sheets. “Hey,” he says. “Did you ever let the cat back in earlier?”

“No,” Rust tells him. And then, blinking a few times against the dark, “For fuck’s sake. Where’s the fucking flashlight?”

“Hold your horses,” Marty says, and even though he’s practically invisible Rust can sense him moving around the end of the bed under black shadow. “We haven’t even got ourselves squared up yet—and cats ain’t stupid, she’ll have holed up somewhere to keep from getting wet in the meantime.”

Rust breathes out a little half-sigh and moves down the hallway, trailing the tip of one middle finger down the wall with Marty following close behind. “Where do you keep the candles?” he asks, slowing when his bare feet hit the kitchen tile.

“Uh, think they’re in the pantry,” Marty mumbles, turning on his phone light and pulling at the neck of his undershirt. “Check the top shelf and—Jesus, it’s already hotter than a sweltering hell in here.”

They pull a few pairs of tall white candles down out of the pantry and set them up on the counter, Rust touching the yellow flame from his zippo to the wick on each one until the kitchen is bathed over in flickering light. The storm still rages hard and heavy outside, the wind gusts something like the sound of a distant woman screaming, and they listen for a moment before Marty’s breaking from under the spell of the sound and moving for the garage with a pocket flashlight in hand.

“Gotta carry this thing out to the patio,” he says, illuminating the dark corner the generator is sitting in. He gets crouched down on one side and wedges the light under his armpit, waiting for Rust to brace up on the other end. “And don’t you dare go and throw out your back on me, that’s the last fucking thing we need.”

“Shit,” Rust grunts, heaving up at the same moment Marty does and backing toward the door. “Here I was worrying about you.”

Settled out on the porch, rain blows in through the screen while Marty bends to check the gas and flip a switch. “Should be good to go,” he says, yanking the pull start on the generator until it roars to life. “Fucking thing better not crump out on me now, been trying to keep it lubed up the past few seasons even though we ain’t had a bad one in a while.”

Rust watches him as he unwinds an extension cord, letting it fall around his feet like coils of an orange snake as they trail back into the house and slide the door shut. He thinks about where Marty might’ve been during Katrina, head filling up with an ozone-flavored vision of the other man standing out in the middle of his sodden yard after the hurricane took its dying breath, alone and piling branches and loose shingles into a heap on the driveway. Sweating and swearing but alive and whole as he collected the fragments littering his life in the wake of a storm.

A thousand miles away in Alaska, Rust had never really bothered to do the same thing.

“I don’t even need the fucking light on to know you’re over there working something to death in your head,” Marty says, fishing the cord out from behind the fridge before plugging it into a power strip. His voice softens some around the next words, just enough to catch even though he’s turned away. “Ghost’s stubborn enough, she ain’t gonna run off and drown.”

“Yeah,” Rust says absently, pouring the false memory of Marty ten summers before out one ear and onto the floor. “You got that maglite handy? Wanna check outside real quick.”

Marty slants him a look but disappears down the hall and comes back after a few moments with the flashlight and the old floor fan in tow, setting the latter in down in the middle of the living room before plugging it in and getting the air moving.

He hands the maglite off to Rust and stands there for a long beat, the two of them listening to a crack of thunder drop and roll so close to the house that the glass door rattles and shakes in its frame. Rust passes the light from one hand to the other, standing there in nothing but a pair of boxers slung low on his hips, and Marty doesn’t know why he tries to put shit off anymore when he knew damn well he was going to cave from the start.

“Come on,” he says with a small sigh, moving to unlock the front door. “Guess we’re gonna ignore all the warning signs, as per fucking usual, and step right out into this shitshow.”

“Just for a minute,” Rust says, leading the way onto the front porch. He clicks on the flashlight so a yellow beam shines out through pouring rain, and when he takes another step something small and mostly-white scurries through the bushes under the awning and tears off down the driveway.

Marty leaves the door cracked behind them and moves to stand at Rust’s right side, breathing easy. “Was that her?” he asks. “Where the fuck did she run off to?”

The neighborhood is pitch-dark, the kind of thick and heavy blackness that makes something in Rust’s head shimmer and pulse for a second with a haze of familiarity. He turns his face and blinks out of it, pointing the flashlight toward the driveway until faded red paint shines. “Maybe under the truck,” he murmurs. “Wouldn’t have gotten far in the rain.”

“I’m following your lead,” Marty says, clicking on the smaller flashlight in his hand, and when Rust steps off the porch into the rain he moves right along behind him.

They’re soaked to the skin almost immediately. A bolt of lightning splits open the sky and for a moment they can see everything clear as midday, come and gone in the blink of an eye. Rust wastes no time in getting to the truck, kneeling down in the grass to shine the light up in the wheel wells.

“You see her over there?” he says when he spots Marty bending down on the opposite side. “Check the wheel—”

“Got her!” Marty says, sitting up quick and lunging toward the rear axle, but no sooner than the words leave his mouth does Ghost drop to the concrete and make a break for it, darting under the truck straight toward Rust.

He fumbles the flashlight but snatches her out of the air mid-flight, getting a hand around the scruff of her neck and holding on tight while she hisses and yowls. Thunder slaps again and Rust struggles to get back to his feet, pulling up on the side of the truck while the soaked cat hangs from his left fist.

“I got her now,” he calls out to Marty, wiping water out of his eyes with the back of the hand still holding the flashlight. “Where are you? We’re headed back inside.”

A grunt and a string of muffled swears sounds through the rain and then Marty’s walking around the front of the truck, pointing out their path with his flashlight. “Won’t have to worry about showering now,” he says, stomping up onto the porch through a puddle. “A bonafide three-ring fucking circus.”

They slip back inside the house and head straight for the kitchen, trailing cold rainwater in their wake. Rust sets the flashlight down on the counter and gets one hand up under Ghost, bracing his fingers around her chest while she trembles against him. “You mind getting me a towel, Marty?” he says, throwing a quick glance in the other man’s direction while he slips his thumb under the waistband of the borrowed boxers. He pulls them down over his hips until they fall with a wet slap to the floor.

When Marty comes back in he’s stripped away his own soaked undershirt, having dropped it off in the laundry room sink. He raises his eyebrows but hands the towel over with another slung around his neck, reaching up to scratch the side of his nose. “You want some pants or something?” he asks, watching slightly open-mouthed as Rust wraps Ghost up in the towel and rubs one corner around her ears.

“Not just yet,” Rust says, sitting himself right down on the kitchen tile, bare-assed with the flecks of water on his skin catching in the candlelight. He holds the cat down and makes slow and gentle work of toweling her off, keeping her swaddled tight enough that she doesn’t try to run away.

“You weren’t worried about her or nothing, were you?” Marty teases, canting one hip against the counter. His boxers are still dripping a wet spot on the floor and he drops the towel, standing there on top of it while he watches Rust.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rust says, smoothing a thumb over Ghost’s head when she makes a pitiful sort of noise. He looks up and blinks at Marty, raising his brows a little. “You gonna go ahead and change out of your wet panties?”

Marty makes a rough noise in the back of his throat and cracks his jaw at that. “Well if my other options involve sitting buck-ass naked in the kitchen floor, I figure I’m doing alright for now.” But then he drops his wet shorts right then and there, wadding them up in the towel before disappearing again down the hall.

The generator’s running too loud to hear the slam of dresser drawers but he comes back a minute later dressed in dry pair of shorts and another t-shirt, balancing a stack of sheets and a couple pillows on one arm. He tosses Rust another pair of boxers and then goes about throwing the sheets open, laying them out in a little pallet on the living room floor.

“We having a sleepover?” Rust asks, finally freeing Ghost from the towel. She springs a few steps away and then stops on the carpet with her fur all in disarray, throwing one hind leg out to start grooming her tail.

“If you wanna keep from sweating that lily-white ass off, then yeah,” Marty says, settling down near the fan. He arranges the pillows and pats the empty spot next to him. “Get on over here, we’re having ourselves a little hurricane party.”

Rust stands and pulls on Marty’s boxers, flipping down the waistband again despite there not being much need anymore, tight enough these days to fit snugger around his hips. He thinks if they really wanted to they could probably share an entire wardrobe of clothes back and forth without a problem, trade off like well-thumbed playing cards, though he’s long since made a habit of borrowing Marty’s old flannel shirts and they both know he used to live in his old bathrobe from the start.

“Wonder what they’re saying on the radio,” he says, settling down on the pallet next to Marty with a sigh. The fan blows across his bare skin as it turns and he shivers a little, shifting closer to the other man. “Check your phone real quick.”

Marty palms his cell and thumbs it back on, holding it overhead so they can both peer at the screen. “Fuck if I can read any of this,” he says, passing it off to Rust. “I’m not getting up and fumbling around for my glasses in the dark.”

Rust opens up the weather radar and waits for it to load, watching the red and orange storm bands move in little waves across the screen. “Still a tropical storm for now, they’re hoping the last leg doesn’t gain more traction in the gulf,” he says, scrolling down through the weather reports. “Bad lightning storms and power outages across the state, probably ‘til sunup at least.”

“If it gets bad enough we can hole up in the hallway, I guess,” Marty says, lacing his hands across his chest. “Back when Katrina hit there was a time or two I thought I was gonna have to get in the bathtub with the mattress thrown over top.”

“Not sure I’d be too eager to go and do that,” Rust murmurs, setting the phone down between them. “Sooner take my chances elsewhere.”

Marty snorts out a laugh and narrows his eyes. “Of course not, Rust,” he says, shaking his head from side to side. “Suppose I’d have to do you like my uncle used to do with his horses, paint my name and phone number on you somewhere and let you run wild in the riverbottom ‘til the storm passed. Just pray some good soul had the decency to bring you back if you got too far.”

Rust smiles a little at that, the corner of his mouth Marty can’t see pulling up on one side. “Naw, you wouldn’t have to stay looking for long,” he says, closing his eyes. “I’d come back alright on my own.”  
  
  
  
  


A loud slap of thunder goes off above the house and Rust’s eyes snap back open, swiveling around until they find Marty still lying next to him, half-awake and breathing soft in the quiet since the generator switched off.

“Shit,” Rust says, drawing one leg up to bend at the knee as he runs a hand over his stomach. “How long have I been out?”

“Only about twenty minutes,” Marty says, a sliver of a grin humming in his voice. “You dozed off before I could suggest gettin’ naked again and making use of all this floor space.”

“Maybe later,” Rust drawls with his lashes cast heavy, turning over on his side. “What you been over there daydreaming about?”

Marty cuts his eyes over, mouth twisting up into a faintly lewd sort of smile. “Well, being down here on the floor got me to thinking about when me and Maggie were first married, but you don’t want to hear about none of that.”

“Know you used to say she could be a real ballbuster sometimes, Marty, but it couldn’t have been that bad.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Marty laughs, reaching over to dole out a gentle slap that lands crooked on Rust’s thigh. “Now you’re gonna sit here and hear all about it.”

Rust hums a little, letting his eyes drip back shut. “Go ahead.”

Marty scoffs some, gaze tracing over the softened lines of Rust’s face in the weak light. “Shit,” he says, sounding just on one side of being hesitant. “Maggie’d probably skin me alive for even thinking about it.”

“She ain’t gonna know,” Rust says. “What else have we got to do? I’m no good at cards and it’s too hot in here to fuck around.”

“So long as it remains a possibility,” Marty says with a little smirk, tucking an arm behind his head. Quiet settles for a moment but then he’s coming back in, the rain still hammering away outside behind the thrum of his voice.

“When we were younger I had a hard time keeping her off me, I mean she’d be on me before I even had the chance to get it up halfway. Came home from work one night right after we’d gotten the house—this had to have been a couple years before Audrey, still in the honeymoon phase of things, y’know—and she met me at the front door. Standing right there so anybody driving by could look in and see from the street, not a stitch on her but a pair of these black heels, had her hair all loose and curled up.”

Marty breathes out a little _hoo_ as he chases the memory. “Honest to God I don’t think we made it off the living room floor for near about two hours. I had carpet burn on me for three fucking weeks.”

He trails off and Rust gently thumps his upper arm, prompting him to keep on. “She surprise you like that pretty often?”

“She used to be wild, man,” Marty says. “The shit I let that woman do to me—you wouldn’t hardly believe it.” But then he reaches over to nudge Rust a little, watching two familiar eyes crack open to peer at him in the dark. “This is a two-way street cowboy, so you gotta dish out now. You got any big exploits under your belt from back in the day?”

Something like a smile ghosts over Rust’s features as he reaches down to scratch behind his knee. “Don’t wanna go and pump you full of any more hot air, but I figure most of those didn’t really crop up until the past year or so.”

“Bullshit,” Marty laughs, palming over his forehead, and if was bright enough in the room Rust knows he’d see a flush burning hot in his cheeks. “What—what about your wife? And holy hell, tell me you don’t got some scratch on Laurie. That woman always struck me like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, probably on account of her managing to grab ahold of you back then, wild as you were.”

Rust closes his eyes again as he thinks, falling back into memories he hasn’t really knocked elbows with in a heavy handful of years or longer. “Claire,” he starts in, the name something hot and syrupy melting in his mouth. “That woman was like a force of nature, blew over you like a hot wind. Had thighs like a horse jockey—knew how to work ‘em, too.”

He’s quiet for a long moment, can feel Marty’s eyes weighing heavy on him in the tight wedge of space between them. He finds the next thread of memory and tries not to smile and give himself away too early. “Laurie liked it when I spanked her.”

When Marty laughs it comes out in a half-startled guffaw. “She did not.”

“Fucking did, man. Wouldn’t let me stop half the time ‘til my hand went numb.”

“How the fuck did you figure that out?”

Rust makes a vague gesture in the air that Marty recognizes as the closest thing he gets to a shrug. “She asked me to do it.”

Marty lets out a low whistle through his teeth, stalling for a second. When his voice comes back in it’s pitched funny and gone a little tight on one side. “Would you do that to me?”

“If you wanted me to,” Rust says after a few beats of quiet. “Don’t see why not.”

“Oh my Lord,” Marty says, throwing a forearm over his eyes. “What the hell else have you gotten up to like that I don’t know about? I can’t even picture this shit.”

“Mmm, not a whole lot worth mentioning,” Rust hums. “Suppose you might’ve figured this out by now, looking back, but I don’t usually find a good reason to go dipping my wick on the casual.”

Ghost decides to grace the room with her presence again, meowing soft and sliding up between them. She buts her head into the hand Marty has draped over his stomach and he scratches around her ears, cotton-soft but still a little damp.

“You know,” he says, “I’d always kinda wondered why you never took to any of those women you went out with aside from Laurie. Pretty girls, too—always hung on every damn word you said. Wasn’t like they weren’t interested or nothing.”

He sighs heavy then, keeping his eyes on the cat. “The—the boys used to say shit at the station early on, I’m sure you weren’t too ignorant of the fact, fucking loud as they were. And I didn’t wanna hear none of it, especially not about my partner in particular, but sometimes I got to wondering, y’know. If there was, uh—any truth to it.”

Marty smiles softly, leaving the rest unsaid. “Funny how shit works out, huh?”

“Ain’t really like that, least not how they figured,” Rust says, pitched quiet. “I’d just sooner go without most of the time.”

“Without what?” Marty asks. “A gal?”

“Kind of.” Rust makes a gentle noise low in his throat, something Marty used to remember like the sound of a gun being cocked with a bullet ready to follow. “I mean sexual attraction and the particular obligations most people tend to tie along with it.”

Marty’s eyes flick back over to Rust’s face, wavering somewhere along his jawline. “You mean sex.”

Rust has always been able to nod with little more than a careful slant of his eyes. “Yeah.”  
  
Marty’s forehead tightens at that but he wets his bottom lip, mulling it over for a moment. “I don’t know if I’m really following,” he says. “You were married once, had a—had a kid. Dated Laurie for as long as you did. And we’re doing what we’re doing here and all, and I…”

He trails off for a moment, laughing a little breathless. “I mean, it always seems like you’re having a good enough time.”

“I do,” Rust says, plain and simple. “Because it’s with you. And it was the same with my wife for the most part, at least until the end.”

Marty’s eyes cut back low so the yellow light from the candles wavers over them, barely catching in the sparse fan of his lashes. “What do you mean, because it’s with me?”

It’s Rust’s turn now to reach down and run his fingers along Ghost’s side, tracing the delicate line of her spine when she starts to purr. “It was a gradual process figuring it out, some trial and error,” he says. “But I get the most out of sex when it’s with somebody I have a deeper connection with—emotional sort of bond, guess you could say. Otherwise I can’t say I’m too interested in it as a purely physical pursuit.”

“You and me,” Marty starts before clearing his throat a bit, like he’s still got room to be bashful after everything, saying it aloud in this darkened room. “We—we love one another.”

The answer that comes back is quiet but resolute. “We do.”

Another flash of lightning flares through the house, illuminating the walls for a split second. Ghost settles down on her haunches by Rust’s thigh and lets her eyes sink closed, content enough to sit and listen to the rain and thunder while she purrs.  
  
“Would you call that anything in particular?” Marty asks after a moment. “I mean, is there a word for it?”

“Just how it’s been for as long as I’ve known,” Rust says. “That I could take either path or even no path at all, so I never really focused on it in any kind of specific terms. Claire was Claire, Laurie was Laurie. Had some stuff in-between, nothing worth much reminiscing. And then you.”

Marty rubs two fingers into his right eye, blinking a little through the smeared shapes that dance in front of it when his hand falls away. “Sometimes I feel like I won something I didn’t really deserve,” he says. “Chances and things—well, looking back at where we came from it can be hard to believe, y’know. How we wound up where we did.”

“Yeah,” Rust says, soft.

“Guess we both know I’ve done some stupid shit in the past,” Marty murmurs, tracing an idle pattern in the carpet with the edge of his thumb. “But I had a good long while to think a lot of that over—enough to know that I don’t figure I’ll ever be wanting to go and fuck things up again. Enough to know that when you got something good, you hold onto it and you don’t let go.”

“And I’m real thankful, Rust,” he says into the quiet space between them, hand falling still. “That you gave me the opportunity—the privilege, guess you could say, of getting this far. With you.”

And Rust thinks about the Marty he used to know, one he still sometimes catches two steps behind the one that belongs to him. A blur of golden corn silk hair and a hint of chewing tobacco underneath spearmint and Maggie’s favorite fabric softener, smearing like a faint light trail in the wake of the Marty he knows best. Just a memory now, though. An echo.

So when he answers he answers for the Marty here, lying on the floor next to him while a storm rages outside, close enough to reach out and touch if he wanted. And he wants to, so he does.

“Yeah,” Rust says, softly skimming the pads of his fingers along Marty’s knuckles, parting past the memory of how they’d split on his face nearly twelve years before. “Me too.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


A handful of minutes past five in the morning find them facing one another from either side of the kitchen counter, eating cold milk and cereal and a halved banana while the hurricane candles steadily flicker and burn lower.

“Thank God for that generator,” Marty says around a half-stifled yawn, pushing the last few soggy cheerios around his bowl before taking it to the sink. “Otherwise we’d be downing a sixer of beer and a half-gallon of ice cream right now.”

Rust has finished his cereal save for the last swig of honey-sweet milk but leaves it untouched, bringing a thumbnail up to his mouth instead. “We should try and get some sleep,” he says, watching Marty knock back a multivitamin and chase it down with a handful of tap water. “Storm seems to be keeping steady enough.”

Marty turns back from the sink and leans forward to brace his forearms on the counter, eyes gone straight to Rust’s bare chest and stomach. The candlelight licks over the scars there, over a blue-beat tattoo and the tiny little paunch of a stomach Rust tends to get when he slouches over these days. That last thing wasn’t there when he first set foot in this house in nothing but that half-open hospital gown two summers ago, Marty knows, and it’s something he gets to keep for himself, somehow—hide away and touch like a memory notch for how far they’ve gotten since then.

“Come back over here and settle down for a bit,” he says, pushing off the counter and trailing a finger along the side of Rust’s thigh as he pads back into the living room. “Maybe I can talk you to sleep again.”

Rust leaves his bowl in the sink and folds himself back on the pallet next to Marty, one hip creaking on the way down. The fan has managed to cool the room off now and he goes willingly when Marty wordlessly pulls him closer, shifting around until they’re pressed and wedged together on one side.

“You comfortable?” Marty murmurs, feeling Rust’s answer tickle somewhere near his ear in a gust of warm breath. The rain has slowed down some outside, washing softer over the roof than before, and he closes his eyes to drift and listen.

“Something about being inside during a storm like this,” Marty murmurs, the hand braced around Rust’s left side trailing a thumb along the three scars burned like star points there. “When I was a kid my mom would get an old sheet out and drape it over a couple chairs in the living room, let me crawl up in there with a book and a flashlight. Always felt like a good place to be, somehow. Safe.”

“You like to read when you were a kid?” Rust asks, the hand on Marty’s stomach rising and falling with every easy breath.

“Mmm, sometimes,” Marty says. “Dad’s mom used to buy me those Hardy Boy books at Christmas and birthdays, but mostly I liked to keep up with comics.” He makes a warm noise somewhere in his chest, something Rust can feel against his side. “Sure I wasn’t up to par with whatever you were busy burning through, probably reading all that Nietzsche shit in the fifth fuckin grade.”

“Not that early,” Rust says, watching shadows ebb and wane across the walls through his lashes. “Mostly field guides and those encyclopedia sets they used to make—ones so old you could smell the start of dry rot on them, probably been around since before the first world war. Always liked looking at the pictures of animals and botanical drawings, trying to match them up with shit we saw out in the woods. Guess that was around the time I picked up a pencil and started sketching.”

“You should do that more often,” Marty says. “Draw. Too damn good at it to let the talent fall off to the wayside.”

Rust slides his hand further up Marty’s chest, skimming over the thin white cotton. “How do you know I don’t?”

“What’s that mean?” Marty asks, toned halfway suspicious as his eyes cut to the top of Rust’s head. “Hardly ever see you crack open that ledger to draw anymore.”

“Maybe because you’re sleepin’ when I do,” Rust says, a touch quieter than before. “You think I was taking down case notes in bed the other morning?”

“Shit, I don’t question what you do anymore, I—what?” Marty says, a puff of warm air blowing through the waves on top of Rust’s head. His voice tightens up another octave, stuck somewhere higher in his throat. “I was _naked_ , Rust.”

“Yeah,” Rust says, trying not to smile. “You were.”

Marty makes a strangled noise and turns his nose into Rust’s hair. “Oh, it’s all coming out in the wash now, huh? Forget sleeping, what we should do is sit here and play a round of twenty goddamn questions.”

“You sure you wanna do that?” Rust asks, rolling over onto his side as Marty shifts around so they’re facing one another like two uneven ink blots mirrored in the dark. “I play to win.”

“I’ve seen you work a box, I ain’t any kind of fool,” Marty says, setting his jaw up in that squared bulldog determination. “But you haven’t worked me over in one before.”

“Don’t need to,” Rust says, tempered casual, ignoring the implications of his words to watch Marty’s eyes flicker low to his mouth. “Been reading you like a book for a lot longer than you think.”

“Oh yeah?” Marty asks, gaze darting back up to Rust’s. “Guess what I’m thinking right now.”

Rust’s tongue darts out to run along the swell of his bottom lip and Marty’s eyes drop again, unconsciously mimicking the motion with the tip of his own tongue. One slow swipe lingering while the air charges up between them with a faint crackle of static, and the storm’s still waging a war outside but this has nothing to do with any of that.

“Don’t have to guess,” Rust says, and then leans in the scarce few inches until their lips brush together, just a whisper of a kiss punctuated with the scratch of Marty’s thick stubble and the way their noses bump along the way. He pulls back just enough that their lips graze, too damn close to see anything but the blurred lines of their meshing colors.

“Close,” Marty breathes out, voice warm on Rust’s cheek. “But no cigar.”

“Mmm,” Rust hums, unbothered by his loss. “Tell me what you were thinking, then.”

“Was thinkin’ I like it when you smile,” Marty says with the faintest bit of shyness in his voice, reaching up to trail a finger down the line of Rust’s jaw. “With those pretty white teeth of yours that I hardly ever get to see.”

And something about all that gets lodged up in Rust’s craw, a hot welt rising like somebody might’ve snapped a rubber band there. It’s a gust of unexpected feeling rushing in like floodwater and he thinks of the rain gutters outside, choking and spitting under the dropped weight of two decades’ worth of storm clouds, of how long he’s made an unbroken habit of keeping his smile to himself, of how Marty’s been here waiting, counting the hours and days and weeks between the moments he gets to catch a rare glimpse and see it.

Rust wants to smile for him, now and forever. But not yet.

“You know,” he rasps, trying to will some of the rattling hoarseness out of his voice, the taste of blood and gravel and dirty port water. “I never told you this, but they aren’t all real.”

He feels it when the lines of Marty’s body tighten and go tense. “What’s not real?” he asks, careful, like Rust might be watching four walls of their world fall down around them one by one like toppling blocks. “Rust.”

If he closes his eyes he can go back to that night in Texas, drop back down to the red-soaked concrete, still warm in the wake of a sun that had slipped like a drop of blood below the horizon. The flames of hell licking hot and caustic up his left side and he was more than ready for them to come and claim him, more than ready to slip free from the hand of existence and not come back. But right before the end and the distant scream of sirens the only thing that had come to find him was a steel-toed boot, and one swift kick had drug him easy and willing down into the empty blackness.

When Crash woke up his name was Rustin Cohle again and he was handcuffed to a hospital bed in Texas with his jaw wired shut. Morales was standing outside the door wringing his hands like the shade of Iscariot, though his thirty pieces of silver had already been saved and spent.

“The teeth were comp from the state,” Rust says, slowly blinking back into the present, listening to the rain wash down the sides of his and Marty’s house. “Outside the offered pension after they got kicked out at Port Houston. Thirteen implants. Flew the fucking dentist in from Chicago.”

For a long moment Marty looks like he might break and cry. But he doesn’t, eyes just gone glassy-wet in the half dark as they search Rust’s face. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that?” he asks, quiet.

“Most of the time I forget,” Rust says, because that’s the truth. “Used to be on my mind more, back in the early days. But like everything else you tend to learn to work around it. Never really seemed like the kind of thing worth mentioning.”

Marty chews on the inside of his cheek and Rust waits for any number of words to break into the air. There’s a strange flickering second where that old echo of a younger Marty steps into the waiting room in his head, dropping unspoken lines that rattle around in a space shaped like a familiar old Honda left to sit out in the Louisiana sun. _That why you say some words like you’re sucking them through a straw? Seems to me that’d have been a good enough reason to learn to keep your fucking mouth shut._

What Marty does say, though, is something seventeen years different.

“Gimme a smile.”

Rust almost laughs, breath rushing out in a harsh kind of wind. “You asking like that defeats the whole purpose.”

“Does not,” Marty tells him, voice humming with a pinch of defiance as he sneaks a finger toward Rust’s armpit. “Bet I can make you.”

“Bet you’re fixin’ to draw back a bloody nub,” Rust murmurs, snatching Marty’s hand as he tries to keep his jaw held firm.

Marty snorts and quits struggling with him, letting his hand go slack in Rust’s so the pair of them sink to the carpet, still clasped together.

“Please?” Marty tries again, briefly pouting out his bottom lip. “Just a little one.”

And this time Rust does, a faint smile only growing wider when he sees a gap-toothed grin shining back at him.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Dawn should be rising soon but the sky is still washed over dark with rain, thunder rolling further in the distance. Rust brings an old towel with him out onto the porch and wipes water off the deck chair, settling down in the creaking frame before he puts a cigarette between his lips.

He cups the flame with one hand until the end catches, sucking down a long pull as he clinks the old zippo shut. It touches down on the glass table between the deck chairs, the second one still wet and sitting unoccupied.

Maggie had called Marty’s cell at ten ‘til six, sitting up in bed with Ted Sawyer in her big white house. Rust thinks about how long she’d waited, how many times her finger had wavered over the call button or if it had even wavered at all.

Marty’s still inside on the phone and Rust blows smoke up into the humid air, thick with the smell of rain and wet earth. The frogs are bolder now in the calmer part of the storm, and he listens to them chirp and croak until the glass door is sliding open behind him.

“All’s well and good over in Baton Rouge,” he murmurs, stepping out onto the damp concrete. Rust flicks a bit of ash over the side of his chair and Marty watches the tip glow orange in the blue-black shadow, flaring up brighter when the other man inhales deep and releases, the last few vestiges of smoke laced with a wet-sounding cough.

He clicks the door shut but doesn’t sit down, leaning one shoulder back against a wooden beam to cross his arms. “Thought you were wantin’ to do better about giving that up,” he says, eyes traveling over Rust’s outline. “Calling it quits for good.”

Rust holds the cigarette between finger and thumb and looks out across the darkened yard, a tendril of smoke curling toward the ceiling from the corner of one eye. “You know that’s easier said than done,” he says, bringing the filter back up to his mouth. “I’ve been making an effort to keep it away from the baby.”

“Well, I’m not doing too much worrying about Lilah,” Marty says on a sigh. “Just seemed like you were keeping off them pretty good there for a while, is all.”

“I have been,” Rust says. “This is the first time I’ve been out here since last night. Been cooped up with you telling campfire stories since four in the morning.”

“Yeah,” Marty says, glancing down toward his feet. “S’pose so.”

Rust watches him for a long moment, blowing a dark stream from the corner of his mouth on exhale. “What is it you’re wanting to say that you ain’t saying, Marty?” he asks.   

Marty’s jaw tightens up some but his body stays relaxed, one ankle crossed loosely in front of the other. “I didn’t come out here to fight with you about it,” he says, easy enough. “But I’d have thought you’d be a little more interested in hanging it up, now, seeing how there’s a few folks out there who wouldn’t mind if you stuck around.”

“Wasn’t planning on going anywhere,” Rust says, eyes briefly wavering in Marty’s direction. “Unless you got it in your head that the smell’s bothering you all of a sudden.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Marty says on a harsh laugh this time, posture breaking like a dropped glass. “You think any of the shit that kills you sends a postcard the week before it comes into town? What the fuck do you reckon you’re waiting for? Because if it’s waking up one morning with a lungful of black blood, then I don’t—”

“Alright, Marty,” Rust snaps, bending over to stub the rest of the cigarette out on the patio floor before standing. “For fuck’s sake.”

He breezes past and steps back into the house, leaving the door open wide like a waiting maw of a mouth behind him. The fan is still blowing in the living room, making one slow turn at a time, and Marty came out here to restart the generator but steps inside now without having ever touched it.

Rust is standing in the dark house by the counter, trailing one fingertip around the lip of a glass filled with lukewarm tap water. He doesn’t look up when Marty walks in, eyes on the candles dripping white wax down their sides to pool on the paper plates they’d been set on.

“You gonna come back over here and sit down?” Marty asks, and when Rust doesn’t move he sprawls out on the empty pallet by himself, closing his eyes against the ceiling as he starts talking over the low hum of the fan.

“Remember how I dipped all those years,” he says. “Back when we were catching for the state.”

Rust remembers the earthy-sweet smell of the loose tobacco, long car rides and coke cans in cup holders that Marty’d bring up to his mouth to spit in, a memory-engraved image of the other man working his jaw as he sat in a wedge of sun coming through the window, tapping his hand along the steering wheel in time with the afternoon radio.

There’s a long moment of quiet, but then Rust’s letting his shoulders drop, slowly picking up the offered line. “I’d wondered why you’d up and quit when I came back,” he says. “Green tea shit and all, just seemed to make sense. Like you’d grown up and out of it.”

“Yeah,” Marty says. “That might’ve been part of it, later on. But then I also had a good fucking reason.”

Rust keeps quiet while Marty weighs his next words around, idly pressing along his sternum through his undershirt like he can force the right things out if he jimmies them loose. Part of him wonders if it’s the right thing to say—the right time, the right place, if it’ll all fall on deaf ears like an empathy card full of empty white, as if any of Rust’s problems have ever stooped to stand on level ground next to his own.

When he decides, he clears his throat and tries to find Rust’s eyes across the room. “Come back over here for a minute,” he says. “So I can talk to you right.”

He waits until they’re both spread out on the floor again and it feels absurd, two full-grown men lying on a pile of blankets on the floor to talk. Feels fucking foolish as they both stare at the ceiling with a thin ream of empty space between them, but maybe this is the level playing field Marty thought he couldn’t manage.

“I didn’t say any of that for nothing,” he says. “Because sometimes I—uh, well I get scared, Rust. Thinking about shit, the future, how the both of us have been put back together a few too many times. You, most of all.”

Rust turns his head on the pillow, eyes following the bridge of Marty’s nose. “What are you talking about, Marty?” he asks, keeping his voice held soft. “You said there was a reason you quit.”

Marty bites into his lip and lets his eyes drip shut. “I quit because I thought it was going to wind up killing me,” he says, talking faster now. “And it ain’t really a big deal anymore, I’ve been in the clear for a while now, but about two years before you came back there was—there was something I had to get taken care of, you know, and when you go toe-to-toe with shit like that it all kinda lines up so you can figure out what the fuck you gotta hold onto and what you gotta cut loose.”

He draws in a deeper breath, letting it out slow, slow, while his heart hammers something staccato in his chest. “Got diagnosed with an early stage of what could’ve been mouth cancer, had to get it cut out. Turns out twenty solid years of packing your lip every day will do that to you. And I fucking feel like we’re on an episode of Dr. Phil or some shit right now, but every time I watch you light one up anymore I think my God, he’s pulling the fucking jenga blocks out one at a time, how long until it all comes falling down.”

Rust can hear somebody’s pulse pounding in his ears, doesn’t know if it’s his or Marty’s but he reaches up to touch two fingers against his neck, feeling the familiar flutter there before he reaches over and does the same for Marty. It’s awkward and his shoulder strains on one side but he finds the second beat just as fast as the first, counting off measured time in his head for a few moments until they both slow off and level out together.

Marty wipes the heel of one hand across his eyes when Rust pulls his fingers away, roughly clearing his throat. “Well,” he says. “There you go, I reckon.”

And the things Rust could say are just as many in number as the water droplets beaded on the glass of the kitchen window, but he’s knows Marty wasn’t looking for a sympathy cue. Wasn’t trying to be selfish with his point, save for the fact that he’s hardwired and hell-bent on keeping Rust as a permanent fixture in his life for as long as he can manage.

Rust wants that to be a good long while, he figures. And good intentions couldn’t dream of healing his or Marty’s minds and bodies in full now but maybe they could heal shit up enough to steer it around a few more nails waiting in the road. There’s a long bright horizon up there somewhere, maybe. If only he sticks around long enough to keep on seeing it.

“I’ll try,” is what he says, two words half-raw in his throat. “I’ll quit if that’s what you want me to do.”

Marty pushes up on one elbow to look at him, eyes shiny black in the dark. “Don’t just tell me that and not do it, Rust,” he says, pitched quiet. “I need to know that you’re—you’re gonna keep both feet in the wagon, y’know? That you’re serious about it this time.”

“I am,” Rust says. “For me and you. But that shit ain’t easy, Marty, I’ve tried--”

“I’ll help you this time,” Marty says. “We can figure it out and we’ll make it work, and if I have to chew that goddamn gum for you myself I swear I’ll fucking do it.”

“Jesus, Marty,” Rust halfway laughs, but then the other man is taking his hand and trying to lace their fingers up together crooked, just enough candlelight to glint off that yellow band.

“Alright?” Marty says, pressing his thumb into the heart of Rust’s hand. “You with me?”

“I’m with you,” Rust says, and before Marty can move he’s gently pushing him back to the floor and looming there above him, letting their eyes brush and meet before leaning in the rest of the way to kiss him.

Rust tastes like smoke and water and Marty welcomes it, gets both hands around the familiar planes of the other man’s back and pulls him down closer so their chests are flush together. One of Rust’s fists knot of in Marty’s undershirt and he makes a low sound with Marty pushes a knee up between his legs, trying to roll his hips once to test the friction.

“Gonna have to buy some more of these fucking candles,” Marty says, dragging a hand down the line of Rust’s spine until it makes landfall on his ass and squeezes through the fabric of his own underwear. “You look good in this light.”

“Mmm,” Rust hums, pausing for breath with their faces held close. “Softens all the rough edges out.”

“It’s sexy, is what it is,” Marty says, mouthing the words warm and wet against the skin of Rust’s throat, and when he shifts to roll over Rust goes with him, arms and legs still tangled up in burning knots with Marty’s.

Time goes away for a little while and Rust’s world is funneled down into the taste and color of Marty, drinking him down in long gulps of something amber-bright and bittersweet, and maybe he’d been waiting for the air to strike just right but there’s a moment when the sky groans and lightning flashes through the window drape, a moment where the fan turns on them at the same time and goosebumps crop up on Rust’s bare skin like a wave of feather-light needles, like he was dropped feet-first down into a pool of liquid ice.

And the realization dawns on him alongside the familiar bone-aching cold that his senses tied to the land a lifetime ago, but Marty’s here with him now, with his hands and his mouth and his steady-pumping heart, and no matter where they go, Rust knows, he’ll be there to warm and thaw him out.

“Marty,” Rust whispers, the word cut soft to land at the stubble-rough corner of Marty’s mouth. “I want you to come somewhere with me.”

“Where the hell are we going at six in the morning with the power gone out?” Marty says, kissing a hot trail up the line of Rust’s throat.

“N—not yet,” Rust says with a gasp as Marty’s lip grazes the little hollow below his Adam’s apple, stilling him with a heavy hand on his chest. “We’d have to plan for it, take some time off from work, but I want you to—want you to go with me.”

“Where?” Marty asks, panting softly as he pulls back. “We can go anywhere you want.”

Rust feels like he has to wait for the word to come, letting it build and gather meaning in his mouth until he can let it fall off the tip of his tongue, rolled out into the space between them.

“Alaska,” he says, and then it’s real.

“Alaska?” Marty repeats, blinking at Rust in the dark. “You really—you really want to?”

“Yeah,” Rust breathes out. “Want you to come with me this time. See the sky, the lights, the stars. Fuck, Marty, I want you to see all of it—everything.”

Marty’s answer comes hidden inside a laugh, pressed soft and warm against his mouth. “Yes,” he says, and Rust’s heart feels like a supernova, bursting open right there like an unfurled star between them. “Yes,” he repeats, kissing a single syllable again in a different spot on Rust’s face every time. “Course I’ll go with you.”

This time Rust’s teeth flash bright enough to spot through the shadow and he smiles against Marty’s lips, moaning right into his mouth when they collide back together in a grappling rush of hands on skin.

“Let me make good on that promise from earlier,” Marty growls, slipping a thumb underneath the waistband around Rust’s hips and pulling the boxers down low. “Air conditioning be damned.”

Rust is just beginning to work Marty’s shirt over his head when power hums back to life in the house, surging through the walls and the open air as the digital displays and appliances whir into motion. The light above the kitchen bar is on and it casts them over in a pool of soft yellow, lying sweat-damp and mostly naked on the living room floor.

“Marty,” Rust says, catching sight of two irises now blue instead of black.

“What?” Marty asks, running a hand down Rust’s side to fit around the curve of his hip.

“Turn the light out,” he murmurs, and guides Marty back into open arms when he kneels down on the floor to find him in the dark.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [stumbles in two months late with a half-empty pack of Lone Star]
> 
> We're getting there y'all, slowly but surely. I know S2 started up a few weeks ago and I'd like to sincerely thank everybody who's stuck with me in the (long, long) meantime, in addition to all the new names and faces that have been popping up around the neighborhood lately. Your ongoing support is appreciated in ways I can't even begin to express, and to know that new and old readers alike are still enjoying this story...well, it means a whole hell of a lot. Thank you.
> 
> Guess this chapter's a doozy (read: dramatized Dr. Phil episode) in terms of slamming y'all with Heavy Content, but I figured if the world slowed down and the power went out, well, it was as good a time as any for these boys to start clearing some smoke in the air and filling in a few potholes behind them. I've borrowed the unfortunate teeth headcanon from the lovely writer known as badwips, so thank you, Sammy, for inspiring that. The rest is likely a bastardization of my own inane headcanons and fifteen months' worth of stomping around in the fandom, so shout-out to all y'all for helping me bring this stuff to life. 
> 
> If you squint hard enough, you might be able to see the Alaskan wilderness coming on the horizon. That'll be a real thing, eventually, but you're gonna have to wait until the end. We've got a few more bases to cover in the meantime, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I've enjoyed thinking about them for the past year. Believe it or not, this thing's been planned out since around last August, I just write slower than the frozen road to hell. But we'll get there.
> 
> Until next time!


	31. indigo

  
A portable fan is set up at one end of the long conference room, making the vertical blinds hanging in the front window dither and sway as the cool air circulates through them. Rust has already gotten halfway through his second cup of coffee but he sits pensive and motionless in one of the padded client chairs, watching gold bands of morning sunlight shrink and expand on the carpet while a stack of papers on Marty’s desk flutter in the false breeze.

He hasn’t had a cigarette in six days. There’s a box of gum roasting in the glove compartment of the Cadillac but he hasn’t popped a single foil on the blister pack yet, told Marty he’d sooner chew raw wood chips than put a piece of it in his mouth. But it’s there, he knows. He’s been thinking about it.

Marty reappears in the doorway of the conference room with his mug of tea and a stack of photocopies in tow, throwing them down on his desktop with a slap before dropping into the nearest empty chair. He brings the cup up to his mouth and pauses with it held there, letting steam curl up in front of his face.

“What’re you over there thinking about?” he asks, easy enough, watching Rust as he takes a small sip. “Wearing that look like you’ve got a bone to pick.”

Rust gives a slight shake of his head, leaning forward to flip open to a new page in his notebook. “Nothin’ in particular,” he says, picking at the cap of a plastic ink pen already scarred with teeth marks. “What time is Lucinda Perry coming in? Shelley had her down on the calendar.”

“Uh,” Marty says, glancing down at his watch just as a silver Porsche pulls into the lot through the window behind him. “Should be any minute now. Appointment was scheduled for fifteen minutes ago.”

“Mmhmm,” Rust says, watching as one stiletto-heeled shoe steps down toe first onto the concrete outside the Porsche’s door, shortly followed by a tan leg and the high-riding hem of a tight black skirt. “Should charge her a late fee.”

Marty follows Rust’s line of sight and turns a little in his chair, briefly watching Lucinda Perry clack and sway down the front walk until she gets a fuchsia-nailed hand around the door. “I’ve only spoken to her on the phone one time,” he says, clearing his throat before standing to go flip through the stack of papers on his desk.

“You sure it ain’t a dead husband’s inheritance dispute?” Rust asks, taking another swig of coffee as he watches Shelley greet the woman in the front room. Perry pushes a pair of oversized sunglasses up on top of her teased hair and laughs, pocketbook swinging in the crook of one poised elbow.

“You better hush,” Marty murmurs on the tail-end of something poorly disguised as a cough. “Her daughter’s apparently up and ran off in the night with some two-bit kid, can’t find hide nor hair of either of them.”

Rust makes a vague noise in the back of his throat, pushing away from the conference table and standing as Shelley leads their new client into the room. Marty greets her first with a handshake, guiding the way toward an empty chair before holding out a hand toward Rust.

“My partner Rustin Cohle,” he says, and Lucinda takes Rust’s hand, the long tips of her acrylic nails making the hair on the back of his neck prickle when they skim the edge of his palm.

“A pleasure,” she says, and in her peep toe stilettos she sees eye-to-eye with him on the dot, standing a full inch taller than Marty. Her gaze drops to where their hands are still clasped and she turns his wrist a little until she can see the chewed edge of the skin along his thumbnail, a smile tugging at the corner of her mauve-painted mouth.

“Trying to quit?” she asks, and Rust blinks before gently pulling his hand free.

“Yes,” he says in a curt monosyllable, palming his ledger before stepping around to the opposite side of the table. “What can we help you with today, Mrs. Perry?”

Lucinda eases down into the chair directly across from him with her purse balanced on her lap, waiting until Marty is seated at the head of the table between them. “Please, just call me Lucinda,” she says, lacing her fingers on the tabletop so the diamond bracelet around her wrist sparkles in the light. “Only Mr. Perry was allowed to call me that, when he was still with us—God rest his soul.”

Rust doesn’t have to cut his eyes over to know that Marty is trying to bite the smile off his own mouth, staring hard at the polished wood of the conference table between the stacks of paperwork in front of him. It takes just a second before he’s collected himself into the perfect poise of professionalism, flipping open the closest manila file.

“On the phone you said your daughter had come up missing,” he says, clicking down the point of an ink pen. “Could you elaborate for us? Whether she might’ve gone on her own terms or been otherwise—uh, _coerced_. I think you’d said she’d just turned nineteen…?”

“Jewel turned nineteen two weeks ago,” Lucinda says, flipping her hair over one shoulder. “She’s been running around with the likes of a boy I’ve never approved of and my instincts tell me he probably persuaded her to go against her better judgement. Silly-minded girls at that age, you know—thinking a man is the key to solving their problems when he’ll only get her into more trouble than she can handle.”

She snorts out a delicate wisp of a laugh while Rust scratches a short note into his ledger and lifts his lashes to look across the table. “You’re aware this isn’t a retrieval service, Miss Perry. We can’t bend the law to return a legal adult to you against her will.”

“Of course not,” Lucinda says. “I only wanted to get a handle on her whereabouts, to know that she’s safe. And once I know where she and the boy are courtesy of your fine services, I don’t think I’d have too much of an issue with convincing her to come back home.”

Marty pulls out a new loose sheet and lets the point of his pen rest in the empty box on the top line. “Could you tell us Jewel’s full name, maybe provide a general physical description to the best of your ability. If you have a recent photo that’d be just as well.”

“Jewel Darling Anastos,” Lucinda says, watching Marty write from down the slim slope of her nose. “My first husband was Greek.”

She snaps open her pocketbook and pulls out her cell phone, sliding down the screen with one long-nailed finger until she finds what she was looking for and pushes the phone toward Marty. He glances at the backlit photo and then passes it to Rust, who turns the phone on the tabletop with two fingers but doesn’t touch it beyond that.

“That was taken at her grandfather’s funeral a few months back,” Lucinda says while Rust’s eyes scan over the slender girl in a black dress with lace sleeves. Shoulder-length curls the color of warm wood, olive skin, bright green eyes that seem to lend credence to her namesake. “I don’t keep any photos of her and the boy—you’ll have to pull those up yourselves, if you want a good look at him.”

Rust slides the phone back across the table and picks up his own pen, pressing the chewed cap against one corner of his mouth. “What’s the young man’s name?” he asks, sitting back in his chair.

“Benjamin Renard,” Lucinda says a little coldly before sucking on her teeth with a sound that makes Rust’s eye twitch. “Twenty-one years old. He likes to go by _Fox_.”

“Renard,” Rust says, penning the name in his notebook. “The French word for fox.”

“Is that so?” the woman asks, dark-lined eyes wavering over him. “I never knew.”

Marty clears his throat and glances between them before looking back to Lucinda, folding his hands on the table. “Potentially moot question, but do you have any idea where they might’ve been headed?”

“A former housekeeper told me they were talking about spending time somewhere in Biloxi, Mississippi,” Lucinda says. She twists the large platinum and diamond band on the ring finger of her left hand, holding it out for a look while her mouth puckers into a short-lived pout. “Jewel emptied her bank account and took her little dog. Beyond that I haven’t got a clue, so I was hoping you two could figure out the rest.”

“We don’t generally take cases out of state if that’s where it’d lead us,” Rust says, feeling Marty’s eyes laying heavy on him. “Hope you don’t mind me asking about your interest in this particular firm.”

“Not at all,” Lucinda says, flashing a grin across the table with teeth so white they almost shine blue. “You do know you had prime airtime on nearly every major news station in the country after that awful thing back in 2012? I remember the photo they ran—must’ve been taken the year Jewel was born, as a matter of fact. So as I understand it, you two didn’t pop up on the map last week.”

Her eyes flick between Rust and Marty both, almost catlike. “Seems my interest boils down to the fact that I’m sitting in a room with two of the best private investigators in the state,” she says, drumming her nails once on the table. “Calling anybody else would’ve felt like a waste of time.”  
  


* * *  
  


“She’s got a motivation,” Rust says a half-hour later, working his bottom lip between his teeth as he watches Shelly put papers through the shredder one at a time in the front room. “Just don’t know what it is yet.”

“Yeah,” Marty says. “To find out where her daughter ran off to with this Fox kid.”

Rust shakes his head, eyes full of that distant look and already thrown to some corner of the room. “Don’t mean like that.”

Marty reaches up to pinch the bridge of his nose but keeps his tone held even for the most part. “We haven’t even booted up the computer yet,” he says, blinking at Rust through spots of color blotting across his vision as he presses a thumb into one eye. “Maybe go ahead and tell me how you went and got that figured so quick.”

“Just intuitive thinking for now, maybe,” Rust says, picking up his chewed pen again. “But you sat here and listened to all that. Don’t tell me it didn’t feel like a snake sliding down the rabbit hole.”

Marty shrugs with the roll of one shoulder, leaning back in his chair so the wood creaks under his weight. “I thought she seemed nice.”

“You and me of all fucking people should know that lookin’ nice and being nice are two completely different things,” Rust says, and Marty blinks at that but the other man doesn’t waver. “You remember Tuttle, Childress, all those other big wigs with a gold hand in the dirty honey pot. I ain’t here throwing accusations around, but Lucinda Perry is a woman who knows how to get what she wants through her means. Take one look at her and you can’t deny that.”

“And you’re telling me that wanting to know where her daughter wound up is cause enough for you to start pulling out names like Tuttle and Childress to match corners?”

“No,” Rust says. “I’m saying that people got a knack for hiding their hand in plain sight. Did way back when, still do. Don’t matter what it is they’re going after or how big the scope.”

Two knuckles rap on the doorframe and Shelley pokes her head into the room, brows high on her forehead. “Got a minute?”

Marty throws his eyes to Rust and then back over to Shelley. “Uh, yeah. What’s up?”

“Jimmy Dawson is on the phone, says he’s got to cancel his appointment for tomorrow and reschedule to this weekend sometime if you can swing it,” she says, eyes dropping down to the pink sticky note cupped in one hand. “Also took a message from a Peter Munroe calling to ask about the security detail position you opened up.”

“Don’t guess I had anything planned for Saturday, if he wants to come in then,” Marty says, scratching through the whiskers along his jaw. “Rust?”

“That’s fine,” Rust says. “Tell him to pick a time between nine and twelve, don’t want to block off the whole damn day.”

“And Munroe?” Shelley asks, starting to slowly ease back out the door.

Marty flips up a corner on one of the folders in front of him and clicks his pen to scratch something in the margins of a sheet. “Put his name and number down next to Eli Bellevue, if you could. I’m gonna have to get back with the both of them after while.”

Shelley waves her sticky note as she departs, and Rust watches her walk out to her desk before toeing her shoes off and putting the phone back up to one ear. His coffee’s gone stone cold but he peers into the bottom of the cup and knocks back the last mouthful anyhow, running one finger around the ceramic rim.

“How much are you really planning on expanding the firm?” he asks. “Don’t guess I was here back in the original heyday.”

“Enough to bring in some more revenue, get this place looking a little more lively again,” Marty says, making a wide gesture that’s meant to showcase all the empty desks still sitting in the other room. “We’ve been doing alright on our own but I figured we could start slow with the security services, work up from there, maybe get to a point where we’re hiring more PI guys.”

A grin pulls up on his mouth enough to crinkle around his eyes. “Much as I like being hooked up to the old work plow with you, one day I think we ought to call it a day and retire. Maybe sell this place off and move to Florida, live in a little house by the coast.”

“You think so, huh?” Rust says, watching Marty from under hooded eyes. “Don’t sound like too bad a plan.”

“No, it sure doesn’t,” Marty says, reaching up to tug at his collar with a sigh. He looks lost in his own head for a moment, stepping out of it when the phone rings again in the other room. “And speaking of vacations, looks like we got the whole rest of the week off now that Dawson’s rescheduled…unless you want to take up Perry and skip on over to Mississippi.”

The way Rust is looking at him, Marty almost expects him to lean back and blow a curl of smoke up into the air. Instead he blinks and slides one hand across the board room table. “You really want to take this case.”

“Think we should pick it up and see what happens,” Marty says, and his next words don’t quite stumble past his teeth but it sure sounds like knuckles rapped on the hull of a hollow tree. “Far as I gather it, mama always knows best.”

“I wouldn’t know much about it,” Rust says, eyes slanting back down to his ledger. “And whatever she knows is only what she’s catching through whatever kaleidoscope she’s been looking through for nineteen years. I don’t think the woman knows that girl as far as she could throw her.”

Marty heaves a half-sigh, not enough to fill his lungs but enough for Rust to hear him. “Well,” he says. “She’s offering to cut a mighty big check for the case, if you weren’t listening there at the end. All we gotta do is a little digging around, get down there, figure out where the girl’s been staying, get a good read on johnboy and report back here. Are we taking it up or do you wanna get personal about it?”

Shelley has finally hung up the phone and Rust watches her through the glass wall as she blows steam off a cup of coffee before bringing it up to her lips, still wincing and making a face at the bitter heat. “Mississippi is a long way to drive on somebody else’s premonition,” he says. “You ever take a case this far out before?”

“No, but that’s a question I’d like to slide across the desk of Maynard Gilbough and Thomas Papania,” Marty says with a pointed kind of look, settling back in his chair to lace both hands across his stomach. “And who said we’d be driving? Hop on a plane after breakfast and be in Biloxi before our food settles. Get a damn rental car at the airport and hit the ground running.”

Rust scoots closer to the table and looks down to write something else, making slow and careful work of rounding out each letter on the paper. “Never much cared for flying.”

Marty cuts his eyes over and narrows them with a snort. “That some kind of underhanded way of saying you’re afraid? You must be shitting me.”

“Naw, afraid ain’t the word I’d use,” Rust drawls, sniffing a bit. “And it’s one state over. No use in flying when we could make the trip in a few hours, keep our own car. Probably be cheaper that way.”

Marty’s mouth pinches up for a moment while he decides if he wants to test the line or not, but his old stubborn streak wins out by a furlong in the end. “And just how were you expecting to get to Alaska, if and when we go?”

“I’ve driven it three fucking times, Marty—I’ll do it again,” Rust says, standing from his chair before snapping the elastic band on his ledger into place. “You riding along doesn’t make much difference outside being good company and making the trip easier, considering we could trade off every couple hundred miles.”

He walks toward the door and Marty laughs to himself, reaching up to drag a hand down one side of his face. “You must be out of your cotton-picking mind if you think we’re driving all that way, especially in that old relic from the goddamn Clinton Administration. Shit’s—I mean shit’s changed, _yeah_ _,_ but that’s an awful long time to be stuck in the damn car.”

Rust stops in the doorway and turns to lean into the jamb, the tiniest smile pulling around the edge of his mouth. He thinks about all the things that’ve changed between them but still finds a slightly stricken look pulled like a shade over Marty’s features. “You mean stuck in the car with me.”

“I didn’t say that at all,” Marty says, clearing his throat before meeting Rust’s eye. “I’d fucking walk to Alaska with you if I had to, Rust. Think that much is clear enough by now.”

Rust blows out an easy sigh, some of the tension bleeding from the line of his shoulders. He fingers the strap on his ledger, lashes dropping before they come back up again. “Yeah, Marty,” he says, softer than before. “I know.”

“Good,” Marty says, shifting around in his chair. “Good.”

“Still stands, though,” Rust says, bumping his hip into the door before walking toward the breakroom, voice carrying down the hall like an echo over one shoulder. “I’m not going to Mississippi unless we drive. Not that we even fuckin’ know whether that’s where the kids are staying, yet.”

Marty stands to follow him, picking up both their coffee mugs off the conference table. “Oh, we’re going alright,” he says, slipping through the door before it can swing shut all the way. “I got a feeling.”  


  
 * * *  
  


The next afternoon finds the conference table spread over with scratched-on legal pads and a sprawl of files, mugs of cooling coffee and green tea and Rust’s open ledger. Marty’s been making calls all morning while Rust combs through what public profiles they can dig up on the internet, trying to tease details about Jewel and Fox loose from behind a backlit screen.

They’ve stalled for lunch for the time being, and the phone’s dropped back in the cradle but Marty can still feel a phantom receiver jammed between his ear and shoulder. He rolls his neck until it pops, looking away from where Rust’s been twisting a paper napkin like a Chinese finger trap between his hands to watch Shelley move across the room.

“At this point I wonder why you even bother wearing shoes to work,” he says around a mouthful of grilled chicken wrap, eyes following her as she totes a little plastic watering can over to the potted plants by the front window. “What’s the point of wearing heels if you always take them off the minute you get here?”

“Fashion is all about having good intentions,” Shelley says, moving with a put-on flourish so her dress swishes around her knees. “Besides, there’s not a soul around here but you two. I reckon I’m in good company.”

She fluffs the leaves on a potted lily before moving to the next plant, turning to throw Marty a glance. “Speaking of cultivating a look,” she says, “I’m surprised you’re still holding onto that beard.”

Marty reaches up to feel around his jaw on impulse, brushing his knuckles across one cheek. “Just tryin’ something different, is all,” he says, tone gone thoughtful. “You don’t like it?”

“Well, I don’t think it matters much whether _I_ like it or not,” Shelley laughs, padding over to her desk to water the orchid there, and Marty doesn’t know where the fuck these plants keep coming from but has a suspicion that the last few weren’t gifts from clients. She turns and nods to Rust, a little grin making one dimple pop on her cheek. “What matters at the end of the day is if Mr. Cohle approves.”

“Mmm, Miss Shelley,” Rust drawls with both eyes still on something in his ledger, finally dropping the twisted napkin to bring his coffee mug up to his mouth. “Gonna have to call HR on you.”

“Uh-huh,” Shelley murmurs, still smiling as she plops down behind her desk to take a bite of the pasta salad waiting there. “Anyhow, I think it makes you look dignified, Marty. The salt and pepper’s a nice touch—keeps you rugged.”

“Rugged,” Marty snorts, even though there’s a tinge of pink burning at the tips of his ears when he throws a narrow look toward Rust. “And here I thought it was just this one over here turning my hair white ten years early.”

When the office phone goes off Marty picks up on the third ring, staring a little wistfully at his half-eaten lunch as he slumps back in his chair. “Hart and Cohle Investigative Solutions, Hart speaking.”

He listens to the other end for a few moments and then fumbles around for the closest pen, making a gesture for Rust to push a notepad across the table. “Yeah, yes sir, that sounds like what we were looking for. You said Acacia? And it’s across from—oh no, I hadn’t yet, but I’ll be checking in just a minute.”

Rust watches with two knuckles resting against his mouth until the call ends a minute later, and when Marty hangs up he’s wearing the unmistakable look of a bird dog that just brought back a prize pheasant from the bush.

“Don’t know how the fuck you ever win at cards,” Rust murmurs, but Shelley has wheeled closer in her desk chair to round out the third point in the triangle formed between them.

“What’s the word?” she asks, still wielding her fork and plastic container of pasta salad.

“Guess who made an ATM withdrawal yesterday evening on Acacia Avenue in Biloxi,” Marty says, biting into the grin tugging on his bottom lip as he drums his fingers on the file-covered table. “Our friend the Fox, Benjamin Renard.”

“How do we know for certain that it’s him?” Rust asks, dropping his hand away from his mouth. “And how do we know he and the girl ain’t just passing through on their way to somewhere else? An ATM transaction in Biloxi yesterday afternoon could mean they’re halfway to the Canadian border by now.”

Marty boots up the sleeping laptop next to his forgotten lunch and opens up the web browser, hen-pecking the keys and clicking for a few moments before he finds what he was looking for. When he swivels the laptop around there’s a still taken from a surveillance camera pulled up on the email server, showing Renard standing in front of the ATM with his sunglasses pushed up on his head.

“Contact sent that along for me, there’s no doubt that’s the same kid,” Marty says, pulling the laptop back around after Rust squints at it for a few moments. “As for the rest I’ve got some calls to make yet, but if they’re still in town after three days I don’t see why they’d be in any big rush to head out now.”

“You figure they’re actually staying in that area?” Rust asks.

“Pick up a phone and get a list of the local hotels going, slick,” Marty says, turning back to his laptop. “We’re fixing to try and find out.”  
  


 

An hour and a dozen calls later Rust is resting his elbows on the table to press into his temples, the phone gone hot from his hand and the words running through it. There’s a throbbing ache at the base of his neck that’s raked like a claw up to the top of his skull, starting to trickle down like parasite roots to slowly pound behind his eyes.

Marty stares at him for a few moments when he ends his own call, a seam of concern threading tight between his brows. “You know,” he says, lowering his voice a little, “that stuff’s still out in the glovebox if you want me to go get it.” He doesn’t say what stuff but Rust wants to gag thinking about the rubbery white squares of nicotine, would almost rather swallow a handful of crumpled butts from the cigarette receptacle outside instead.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says with a sigh as he pinches the bridge of his nose between a thumb and forefinger. “How many more numbers you got left to run?”

“Not too many,” Marty says, flipping between two pages on his legal pad, the sound of the crisp paper rustling adding a flare of orange to the ache in Rust’s head. “Few more minutes and we can head on home. Leave all this tedious shit for another day.”

The next call to a bed and breakfast overlooking the water turns out to be a dead end with the clerk snapping down the line about the sanctity of guest privacy, but the attendant at a Hampton Inn two streets over gets back on the line after leaving Marty on hold for two minutes and hums sleepily into the receiver.

“No Jewel Anastos or Benjamin Renard checked in,” she says, something like a pen faintly clicking against hard plastic in the background. “I’m looking through the R’s right now, just a Claudia Ritter and Fox Ren-odd? Or maybe that’s Rennird, I can never pronounce half these names, but—”

Marty’s stomach does a tiny flip, hand gripping tighter around the phone despite the coolness threaded through his voice. “Fox? That’s an unusual sort of name, isn’t it?”

“Definitely,” the attendant says, still sounding bored. A different phone rings in the background and her voice chimes in with a little more urgency. “Sorry we couldn’t find your party, sir, but is there anything else I can help you with? I’ve got another call waiting.”

“Not at all,” Marty says, bright as a summer day, starring and circling a phone number on his notepad. “Thanks so much for your time.”

When he hangs up the phone the tightened look of fatigue on Rust’s face has dropped and changed into something sharper. “Where are they?” he asks, eyes idly searching Marty’s expression like he might find the answer there.

“Got a room under Fox Renard at a Hampton Inn on the main drag in Biloxi,” Marty says, leaning back to slowly swivel in the office chair with his bottom lip caught between his teeth. “So how about that little trip to Mississippi?”

Shelley walks in from the back room with a steaming cup of coffee, setting it down in front of Rust before fisting her hands on her hips. “You finally get a bite on something?”

“Yes ma’am,” Marty says, grinning at her. “Whole rest of the week’s clear until Saturday, right?”

“Seems like it—why, y’all got something hot in the saddle now?”

Marty pushes away from the table and stands, tearing the top sheet on the legal pad out to wave through the air like a victory flag. “Feel free to take off ‘til this weekend,” he says, stacking files and paperwork in one arm before shutting his laptop with a chuffed little click. “And help me get Lucinda Perry on the phone, because it looks like me and Rust are headed for Mississippi.”  
  


* * *  
  


Evening is just beginning to stain the sky with shades of orange and rose tea when Marty parks the car in front of a Walgreens, windows already lit up fluorescent-white in the face of dusk.

“You coming in or sitting out here?” he asks quietly, pulling the keys out of the ignition. Rust’s eyes flicker open and swivel to find him, the blue there turned a shade of caramel when they fill with auburn light coming off the setting sun.

Rust thinks about how many times Marty has asked him this question, how it’s spanned across the mended bridge of twenty years and a thousand different gas stations and drugstores sprawled like dropped thumbtacks across the state. In another life Marty would ask and he’d always decline, get out and lean against the car like an animated scarecrow to light a smoke and squint at whatever scenery the bumfuck town they were in had to offer, feeling sweat dampen the cotton between his shoulder blades and stick to his lower back.   
  
A flipbook of old memories snaps in front of Rust’s eyes in a matter of seconds: a feral cat the color of under-ripe peaches eating from a trashcan outside a 7-11 in Lake Charles, the time in ’97 when he and Marty had to flash their badges to throw off a looming fight between a homeless man and a kid with Kentucky plates on his car. The sweet perfume of gasoline mixed with late autumn out in rural places, the five twenty-dollar bills he’d pressed into the hand of a woman with the same number of dirty-headed children who didn’t have shoes. Marty swearing about gas prices as he tried to round out the number on the pump to something even, the way he’d always go in to pay and come out with a pack of Reese’s cups that were already half-melted by the time the tank was filled. Rust can still see him sitting in the driver seat, tearing open the orange package and having to lick a smudge of chocolate peanut butter off his thumb.

But here and now he pulls the handle on the door and swings it open, ignoring the way the smell of hot asphalt aggravates the ache in his head to slowly unfold himself outside. “What all do you think we need?” he asks Marty as they walk together through the sliding door into a rush of cold air conditioning, sides brushing as they sidestep a woman with a cart full of groceries and a blabbering toddler.

“Just some travel-sized shit,” Marty says, picking up a handbasket and heading toward the hair care aisle. “Couple things, maybe some drinks to take in the car.”

They throw a few things in the basket, small bottles of shampoo and a pack of disposable razors, a travel-sized bottle of mouthwash and a pair of plastic toothbrush covers already packaged together in yellow and blue.

Marty ambles through the pharmacy aisles at the rear of the store and loses Rust in the process, and for that he’s mildly thankful when he passes a bright red sale sign for that familiar bottle they keep in the bedside drawer. A middle-aged woman dressed in a velvet tracksuit stands a few paces away looking at feminine products and Marty carefully sets a bottle of lube into his basket with a casual sniff, weaving past her to turn into the next aisle.

There’s a wall of cough medicine and decongestants and cold remedies, syrupy congealed colors in purple and green and cherry-red. Marty walks past them and lets his eyes drop to the contents of his basket, full of trademarked reminders of Rust’s presence in his life, the other man’s name spelled out there and mixed in with his own. Peanut butter crackers, lube, a sweating bottle of unsweetened tea, the kind of toothpaste that squeezes out looking like a minty barber pole because Rust never could stand Marty’s favorite baking soda flavored brand.

He’s standing in front of the nicotine patches when Rust finds him again.

Marty watches Rust’s eyes swivel over the boxes on the shelves, hears the sharp hinge of air he pulls in through his nose. There’s a sentence crawling up behind it but Marty beats him to the punch, murmuring low before Rust can drawl out some smartass quip to shoot the idea out of open air.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he says into the wedge of space between them, shifting his basket to the other hand, “but I don’t see any harm in trying it. Especially since we’re gonna be in the car so long tomorrow, probably keep you from ripping the stuffing out of the fucking seats.”

Rust stays quiet and Marty lets his eyes flick back up to the other man’s face, impassive as carved stone. “More than that, it might do some good to help ease off those headaches.”

“You can buy whatever you want, Marty,” Rust says, turning to lead the way toward checkout. “Doesn’t mean I’m gonna be using any of it.”

He disappears around an endcap at the far side of the aisle and Marty chews on his bottom lip, scanning quick over the boxes in front of him again. Expensive as hell, but he figures they’d pay for themselves in gold by the end considering what he’s got weighing down the other side of the scale.

Up at the register, they both watch the cashier drop a little cardboard box into the bag Marty hooks over his elbow before they walk back out to the car, early night draped like a dryer-warmed towel over the earth now. Rust eases into the passenger seat and slides his hands over his thighs, sighing deep while Marty cranks the engine over. He takes the bags and sets them in the floorboard between his feet, lets Marty turn the radio on low and doesn’t say a word.  
  


* * *  
  
  


Dawn finds Rust and Marty standing on either side of the bed, folding clothes and toiletries into their duffel bags while daylight starts to brighten behind the window blinds. Ghost sits in the middle of the mattress between them, occasionally twitching her tail or turning her head to either side, watching familiar hands fold socks and pants instead of reaching down to pet her.

“Probably should bring something nicer just in case,” Marty says, going to the closet to flip through his long sleeved button-ups. He pulls out a grey one with a sheen of silver and then turns to glance at Rust, brows raised just a hair.

“The dark blue one,” Rust says softly, zipping up his bag before setting his ledger on top. “If you don’t mind.”

Marty reaches into the other side of the closet and pulls the hanger in question off the rack, holding them together in one hand while he slides the door shut. The fan is turning above them but he suddenly feels too-warm in the soft yellow light of the room, a faint dizziness clouded up like woodsmoke behind his eyes. Almost like déjà vu, except he can’t put a finger on ever having stood in this moment before.

He looks at the dress shirts again and blinks through it, draping them over the foot of the bed before going to zip up his own duffel. Rust sits on the edge of the mattress to pull on his boots, letting Ghost purr and rub against his back while he laces them up one at a time.

She turns away from him after a moment and walks across the bedspread to bump her head into Marty’s stomach before rubbing across his thighs, tail curling like a bottlebrush around his hip.

“Well, what d’you know,” Marty murmurs, reaching down to scratch around her ears and under her collar. “Somebody’s pleasant as punch this morning.”

“She knows we’re leaving,” Rust says, slowly standing to take both their bags in hand before doling out one last sweeping palm along Ghost’s back. “We got everything left out for Shelley?”

“Uh-huh,” Marty says, stepping around to twist off the bedside lamp before following Rust down the hallway. “And if she puts another sissy-ass princess tag on this poor cat again, I swear straight up and down I’ll fire her.”

“Mmhmm,” Rust hums, setting their bags by the front door before moving to cant one hip against the counter, watching Marty divvy up the steaming coffee pot between two thermoses. “Like to see you try.”

Marty screws the lid onto Rust’s coffee and passes it off, hesitating just a moment too long before he lets go. He reaches up to scratch the side of his nose while Rust’s eyes rest heavy-lidded on him, watching Marty over the rim of his thermos while he sucks down the first swig of caffeine for the day.

“Hey,” Marty starts in, dragging one palm down the side of his thigh. “About those patches, man—”

Rust shakes his head one time, eyes cutting low and away. “Told you before, I don’t take stock in that shit.”

“But it might help you,” Marty tries, running his tongue along his lip while he searches for the right thing to say. “I—I want you to feel okay, you know? _Better_ _,_ at least. And I know it’s hard but it ain’t any kind of fucking failure, going easy on yourself every once in a while.”

“I’m not walking around looking like a tool with a fucking patch on my arm, Marty. I’ve gone off plenty of shit cold before, no reason I can’t do it again.”

Marty recalls vague wisps of things Rust’s told him throughout the years, that four-month stint in Lubbock and waking up cuffed to the bed in Houston Methodist with an armed officer standing outside the door. He’s still not too sure about what went down inside those four no-man’s land years in Rust’s life, has come close to asking before but never does in the end. But he remembers the ink and cayenne cocktail clear as day, the big bore needle at home in Rust’s left hand and the black-blown wild look in his eyes. He doesn’t want to think about much more than that.

“Wasn’t saying you couldn’t,” Marty says, trying his damndest not to let this turn into a full-blown argument in the middle of their quiet kitchen. “And it doesn’t have to go on your arm, can put it somewhere where the sun don’t shine and it’ll work just as well.”

Rust’s jaw sets like a steel trap and Marty wonders if he’s lost this one for good, reaching up to palm the back of his neck while he lets out a low sigh.

“Will you just give a shot?” he asks after a long moment, looking up to not quite meet Rust’s eye. “One time. For me, I guess.”

There’s only the hum and click of the refrigerator between them for a few beats but then Rust is clearing his throat, limbs gone looser like somebody’d gone and cut a few of his marionette strings. “Alright,” he says, nothing else, and Marty moves as steady as he can while he goes to retrieve the box, remembering the old ranch hand routine of walking with clear intent around the back of a spook-easy horse.

When he comes back Rust’s lips are still pressed into a firm line, the usual softness he’s become used to seeing there gone rigid with enough tension to bend nails. Marty’s almost scared to touch him for a split second, like he’s hold out a hand to stroke the body of some sharp-taloned bird in lieu of a familiar man.

He knows down to the bone that Rust wouldn’t hurt him but he still feels awkward in the moment, reaching for the hem of the other man’s shirt in a context they haven’t yet tread. “I’m just going to put it on your hip,” he murmurs, peeling the back off one patch and letting the edge stick to his thumb while he pulls Rust’s undershirt out of his pants. “Hold on.”

The adhesive sticks without a problem and Marty gently rubs his fingers over Rust’s side to smooth it out even, letting his hand linger there before it slides around to rest at the small of his back. He feels Rust’s eyes weighing heavy on his face, making a pink flush burn like heat lighting up to the height of his throat.

“Thank you,” Marty says, dropping his mouth to press a quick kiss to Rust’s shoulder before stepping back. And then he’s picking his coffee up in one hand and stowing the box away with the other, waiting while Rust gets his shirt tucked back in before checking the lock on the front door.

They get their bags and flip the lights off, leaving the dark house behind them as they step out into early morning through the garage.

  
  
  
  


Rust watches the sun crest and climb higher along the eastern horizon, as deep an orange as the marigold yolk from a wild duck egg. It brightens as it sprawls over Louisiana like a broken flask, lighting up the curving I-10 that’ll take them from Lafayette through Baton Rouge.

The radio is playing low on some soft rock station and that always seems to be Marty’s default for early mornings and late nights in the car, the lulling hum of it something gentle on the ears while they mingle together in easy silence. Rust sips at his thermos and doesn’t quite listen to the words of each song while he drifts alongside his own thoughts, watching the landscape blur past through the tinted window.

Halfway to Baton Rouge they hit the morning rush and the car slows to a crawl on the interstate, stop-and-go traffic even in the far left lane while people try to merge like upstream salmon for the closest exit. Marty fiddles with the radio for a few moments, switching to a different station and then back again as he taps his fingers to some unknown rhythm on the steering wheel. He turns to look out the driver side window and scratches through his beard, and he hasn’t said a word in something like a half-hour but Rust’s eyes are on him before he even draws a loaded breath.

“Been thinking,” Marty says, sliding his hands around the arc of the steering wheel as the car creeps a few feet forward. “How long do you think we’ve been together, exactly? Not CID and all that, but I mean—together like we are now, y’know.”

Rust blinks and wedges his thermos between his thighs, chasing a drop of coffee around the plastic lip of the lid. He squints through the windshield for a few moments and shakes his head one time, more in indecision than anything else. “Not too sure on anything exact, but it’s been a good while,” he says. “Figure it might depend on how you want to define togetherness. Also gotta keep in mind that our starting points for the relationship might not be mutually exclusive.”

“Christ, make me feel like I’m talking to a shrink about all this,” Marty murmurs, letting a blue sedan merge in front of them before he continues on. He slides Rust a look from the corner of his eye and clears his throat before looking back out the windshield. “Well, when do you reckon it came clear to you? What _event_ _,_ guess I should say.”

“Can’t say it was any one thing in particular,” Rust says, settling down lower against the back of his seat. “Feel like I was just following tracks in the sand, sometimes. After Carcosa. Like I knew we’d get there eventually.”

The air isn’t turned on high but Marty feels a chill run through him at those words, like the tip of a feather whispering up the line of his spine. “How soon did you start feeling like that?” he asks, not quite chancing a look at Rust this time.

“Pretty early on,” Rust says, not offering anything more than that despite the vagueness of it making Marty’s stomach shudder in his gut. There’s a thick moment of quiet and then Rust is dropping three more words, a little rough-hewn like he might’ve had to mine them somewhere from the back of his mouth. “What about you?”

Marty knows within an inch of surefire certainty, the moment when the idea of what would eventually turn into All This was first planted in his mind. Knows it down to the taste and smell and feel of the air around him, but he can’t say it, not in this rolling car forty miles from home with nowhere to go but ahead. At least not right now.

“Maybe for the sake of where I’m going with all this,” he tries, “it’d be easier to figure out the first time we both—well, the first time you and me—”

“Had sex,” Rust says, two words tossed out soft but barefaced.

“Uh, yeah,” Marty says, reaching up to thumb across his mouth. “Yeah.”

Rust wades through the warm pool of memory from that night, how the scar on his stomach was still tender-pink and how Marty’s fingers and lips had brushed so gently against it, like the satin-soft tips of a songbird’s wings. The room bathed over in yellow lamplight, a beautiful kind of ache unfurling along the need burning in his stomach and a handful of words whispered against the pulse jumping in his throat.

“When I got my stitches out,” he says finally, blinking back into the present. “That night.”

Marty makes a content sort of noise in his chest, smiling a little. “Mmm,” he hums, a touch softer than before. “That’s right.”

“Remember you thought you were gonna hurt me,” Rust says, still hearing an old echo of Marty’s hesitation in his head. “Kept having to tell you to get on with it.”

Two blue eyes snap over to his face quick as a bullwhip. “I don’t remember hearing any complaints,” Marty says, making a rough sound in the back of his throat.

“Also remember it was the night you asked me to stay,” Rust adds, easy as anything, watching Marty’s hands on the wheel. “So maybe that’s the sort of answer you were lookin’ for.”

Marty’s gone as red as a beet but he doesn’t throw up any bluster to try and deny it. “Yeah,” he says after a moment. “I do remember that.”

The crow’s feet at the corners of Rust’s eyes deepen and crinkle and he feels more well-rested in this moment than he has inside the past two weeks. Fatigue still hangs heavy like an old yoke around his neck but the ache in his head has waned for the moment, enough to let a smile pull up one corner of his mouth.

Marty catches sight of it and narrows his eyes, smiling a little despite himself. “Well shit,” he says, “I didn’t mark it down on the damn calendar or nothing. Whole point of me asking was to try and figure out what the fuck we could call an anniversary, but two years out and I can’t think of a solid date to save my life. Must’ve been around this month sometime, though.”

“Our anniversary,” Rust echoes, whistling soft around the tail-end of the word. He glances at his left hand, catching the flash of gold there glinting in the morning sun. “Hmm.”

“Anyways,” Marty sputters, looking crossways at Rust. “No more beating around the bush with it, but I was thinking we could make somethin’ of this little trip to Biloxi. It’s right on the coast, should be downright beautiful this time of year. When we aren’t working the case it’d be nice to maybe sit back and relax a little, take some time for ourselves.”

Rust palms his coffee thermos between both hands, peering through the windshield as traffic starts to move faster again. “That why you were so eager to pick up Perry’s case and run with it?”

“Well I’d have preferred if she was funding us to fly to Tahiti and sip goddamn margaritas on the beach but I’ll take what I can get,” Marty says. “Seemed like an open and shut deal, and then we’d have most of the week left to blow.”

“Maybe,” Rust says. “Feel like these kids might give us a bigger run for our money than you were first thinkin’.”

“Shit, cases like this are patty-cake on the playing field,” Marty says, adjusting his sun visor before merging over into the center lane. “Like shooting big fish in a barrel. Bet you we’ll have them both in the crosshairs before suppertime.”

The Baton Rouge exit is coming up in another ten miles but they’ve got enough gas to get to the midway point in Ponchatoula. They’ve both been there once before, somewhere around ’99 when a group of strawberry pickers found a dead girl in the fieldhouse before dawn, eleven years old with her skull bashed in. Aggravated blunt-force trauma with a claw hammer, and she’d looked as peaceful as a sleeping angel until they’d finally moved her and seen the blood and grey matter spilling into the dirt.

Marty had gone out and nearly dry-heaved, standing in the middle of a sprawling maze of ripe strawberries waiting to be picked, glinting red as polished rubies with morning dew. Rust remembers the head farmer getting a picker to bring them a flat of berries for the road, and Marty’d taken the bunch but hemmed and hawed at Rust until he accepted a little green carton of the fruit like bartered payment for having borne witness to fledgling death.

He rinsed the strawberries in his apartment sink and bit into one while he stood alone at the kitchen window. It’d been the sweetest thing he’d put in his mouth in weeks, and he wanted to gag while red juice beaded and pooled in the palm of his hand but the reflex never kicked in. Every single berry had been eaten by the following morning.

They pass an old-timey looking billboard advertising the same city as the _Strawberry Capital of the World_ _._ Marty watches it flash by before looking straight ahead, the sun coming through the windshield making his blonde eyelashes shine like white gold. “Probably stop in Ponchatoula for gas and a piss,” he says. “You think you’ll be ready for lunch by then?”

“Might be,” Rust says, feeling his dry mouth water at the thought of some of the famous sun-ripened fruit. “See when we get there.”  
  


* * *  
  


They switch sides in Ponchatoula after finding a little diner booth for early lunch, and Rust’s still behind the wheel when the car noses off the interstate and weaves down to the main drag on Beach Boulevard in Biloxi. Marty lowers his window and lets a warm gust of the ocean breeze in, watching the flat ribbon of coast shimmer past in a stretch of sand so white it almost looks like fresh snow.

“We need to plug this hotel into the GPS?” Rust murmurs, slowing to let a small flock of women in sundresses and bathing suits navigate the crosswalk at a light. “Probably off one of these main streets on the left.”

Marty checks the address again and then types something into his phone, holding it out in front of his face to read the print without his glasses. “Remember when you used to sit over here trying to navigate with the fuckin’ Louisiana atlas open in your lap? And half the time I had to stop and beg directions off some two-toothed hillbilly in a bait shop attached to the town’s one-room post office.”

“Different time, back then,” Rust says, watching the street signs once the light turns green again. “We any closer?”

“It’s somewhere here on the main boulevard,” Marty says, tapping his phone screen. “Two blocks up on the left I think, just before Azalea Street.”

They pull into the Hampton’s lot and let the car idle in a spot at the far end of the row, Marty busy shuffling through a manila folder stowed around his feet. He pulls out a few xerox copies of photos pulled from Jewel’s online accounts, peering at the smiling faces of the young woman and her boyfriend before passing them over to Rust.

“Well,” Marty says. “Guess we should figure out a rough game plan on how surveillance is gonna run on this. I don’t think they’re expecting us, per se, but they might spook easy if they notice us loitering around.”

“They won’t,” Rust says, glancing cursory at the photos before handing them back to Marty with a sniff. “Not if we act the part.”

Marty stops his shuffling to slide a crooked look across the cab. “Act the part? Doing what, pray fuckin’ tell?”

Rust holds one hand up in a gesture that passes for a shrug coming from him. “Whatever we normally do when we’re not at work,” he says. “Some of that.”

“Oh, alright,” Marty says, thumping back against the headrest with a snort. “So two old queers on vacation at the beach, playing up a shtick to keep our cover. All we need is a dress and this shit’ll be straight out of the fucking Birdcage.”

“I don’t know, Marty,” Rust drawls as he turns the car off to step out into the open air, hair already ruffling in the wind coming off the water. “Maybe taking a little vacation isn’t such a bad idea.”

  
  
  
  


“Mr. Renard’s uncles?” the curly-headed woman behind the front desk says, looking between Rust and Marty with her brown eyes gone a little wider. “You don’t say.”

Marty braces one forearm across the counter and smiles with as much southern charm as he can muster, fishing his wallet out of his back pocket in the process. “Yes ma’am, most of the extended family’s flying or driving into town for a wedding—my other sister’s daughter, hitching up with her high school sweetheart. Fox and Jewel just got a head start on the rest of us, down here having themselves a grand ole’ time by the sound of it.”

“Oh, well there’s plenty to see and do down here in Biloxi,” the woman says with a bright smile, glancing between the two men again. Her gold-plated nametag reads _Samantha_ _._ “There’s even a national poker tournament being hosted at the Beau Rivage this weekend, but anyhow—were you looking for a room near your party?”

“Uh—that’d be great, actually,” Marty says, shifting his weight over onto one hip. “Do you have anything in the same hall?”

“Sure thing,” Samantha says, pressing a few buttons on her computer keyboard. “Smoking or non-smoking?”

“Non,” Rust says, even though he’s angled away to watch the rest of the hotel foyer. The elevator dings and a young woman and a little girl with a bag full of beach towels step out, walking hand-in-hand through the sliding doors into the afternoon sun.

Samantha taps a few more keys and scrolls down, tip of her tongue running along the ridge of her teeth. “Let’s see,” she says, peering at the screen. “We have a queen right next door but if you’d be more comfortable with two beds there’s a double available at the east end of the hall—”

“Queen’s fine,” Marty says, clearing his throat a bit. “We’d rather stick close, if you don’t mind.”

“No problem,” Samantha says, looking up again as she tucks a curl behind one ear. “I assume you’ll be paying for the deposit today, Mister…?”

“Hart,” Marty says, turning to look over his shoulder for Rust. He’s meandered across the lobby to stroll through the breakfast lounge, peering down the halls branching off either side of the room with his ledger still tucked under one arm.

“Is—is he looking for something?” Samantha asks, leaning over the front desk to watch Rust as well with her mouth slightly ajar. Marty smiles again and opens his wallet to push his ID and credit card across the counter, patting them once with the flat of his hand.

“He just doesn’t get out much, is all,” he says, shaking his head like it’s an old inside joke between the two of them. “Gets real excited about those continental breakfasts.”  
  
  
  
  


Their room is tidy but pretty run of the mill as far as chain hotels go, decorated with a light blue bedspread that Marty dumps onto the floor as soon as he drops his bag and then a handful of bland seascape paintings hanging in coordinated spots along the wall. Both dress shirts find their temporary home hanging on the empty closet bar and then Rust pulls the window curtains back on the rod, squinting down into a first-rate view of the parking lot below.

“Renard usually drives a black SUV that he didn’t leave in Louisiana, so we can keep an eye out for anything similar that pulls into the lot,” he says, hitching his hands up high on his hips. “Perry said that Jewel brought her little dog, so unless it’s pissing in the shower I imagine they’ll have to take it out every few hours.”

Marty drops down on the bed and stretches out so his feet are hanging off the end of the mattress, hands laced behind his head. “Short of knocking on their damn door—which I don’t suggest we do just yet—, looks like this is gonna be one big waiting game. But they’ve gotta be coming and going, so on the off chance we miss them once it won’t be long ‘til we catch them again.”

Rust picks his ledger up off the night table and stands at the edge of the bed, peering down at Marty through his lashes. “You taking a nap?”

“Uh-huh,” Marty says, eyes already slipped shut. “Why don’t you lay down for a bit too, try and get some rest. Felt like you were tossing and turning all night long.”

“If I sleep now I won’t catch a minute later,” Rust says, tucking their room key card into his shirt pocket. “I’m going to canvas around the hotel, maybe talk to a few of the staff. Be back after while.”

“Alright,” Marty mumbles, toeing his shoes off so they thunk onto the carpet. “You got your phone?”

“Yeah.”

“’M just gonna take a short nap. Call me if you need me.”

“I will.”

“You’d better.”

Rust eases out into the hall and makes sure the lock clicks behind him. He takes a few silent steps and presses his ear to the door of the room next to theirs, holding his breath to listen for a few long moments. There’s nothing but the low pulse beating gently in his own ear and what might be the AC unit humming on the other side, so he strolls down the hall and past the elevator, taking the stairs two flights down to the main lobby.

Different signs point him in the direction of the bar lounge and indoor gym, but the afternoon light is slanting in through the windows like citrus and warm ale in his mouth so he steps through the glass doors onto the empty pool deck instead, watching the still water as he slips past the iron gate and follows the concrete path around the side of the building.  
  
  


* * *  
  


“Marty,” Rust says, brushing the line of the other man’s shoulder with two fingers. “Marty.”

“What?” Marty slurs, cracking open one eye to find Rust standing over him. The room is a shade darker than it was earlier, shadows slanting long and spindly across the wall and carpet now. “You see anything?”

Rust shakes his head and drops down onto the edge of the mattress, one hip wedged up warm against Marty’s side. “No,” he says. “But you’ve been out cold for two and a half hours.”

“Two and a half—?” Marty says, holding up his arm to check his watch. He lets it thump back down on the bed and stretches with a pinched sigh, curving one palm around Rust’s side. “Jesus Christ, what you been doing all this time? Feel all warm.”

“Walked around the grounds, talked to a couple housekeepers and some of the guests that’ve been here all week—just casual stuff, out by the pool. Nobody’s seen much of anything, least not anybody with a dog.”

Marty sits up with a grunt and yawns, idly running his fingers around his chin while he gazes out the window. He keeps the beard trimmed short and even, just enough of it there to rasp and chafe Rust’s mouth red and blotchy if they happen to get kissing for too long. The whiskers are mostly grey and blonde and speckled through with white and they don’t leave much doubt about how old he is these days, but Marty figures he’s settled down in enough life’s lap now for it to not matter like it used to.

That, and Rust hasn’t filed any grievances just yet.

“We probably ain’t gonna get very far until tonight,” he says, sliding a hand around Rust’s lower back. “Kids probably won’t be dragging their asses in ‘til late unless they come back here to get gussied up before hitting one of the casinos, probably drop the dog off if she’s got it with her.”

“Might be in the room,” Rust says. “Didn’t hear anything when I walked by, but they could’ve locked it in the bathroom to keep it from messing on the carpet.”

Marty makes to stand from the bed and twists around so his back pops back into place. He tests his bad knee a few times, bending it back and forth with a slight wince. “Guess we could go get some supper in the meantime,” he says, feeling Rust’s eyes on his back. “Do some more canvassing in the area, bars and whatnot. Get settled in back here by dark.”

Rust splashes some water on his face while Marty laces his shoes back up, letting the other man help pull him to his feet once he’s done. They tuck their files and the laptop away and then take the elevator down to the lobby, a little more lively now that people are slowly trailing inside from the beach, wind-chafed by the ocean air and in search of evening clothes and dinner.

“Where to?” Marty asks, bouncing the car keys on one finger as they trail over to the Cadillac. “Sure we could get our hands on some good seafood around here.”

“Don’t matter to me,” Rust says, leaving one hand flat on the sun-warmed roof as he scans across the parking lot. He squints up at the sky and then back to Marty, leaning into the open doorjamb. “Something about all this ain’t adding up like it should.”

Marty shields a hand over his eyes to throw a lopsided look back at Rust. “Now what’s making you say that all a sudden? We’ve been here just shy of four damn hours. They weren’t gonna fall into our laps the second we got here.”

“Can’t really say,” Rust says. “Just doesn’t feel like the right place, is all.”

He folds himself down into the passenger seat without another word and Marty sighs before tugging his door open and doing the same. “Wherever we go,” he says as they pull out of the lot and turn down the road that runs parallel to the water, “it needs to be somewhere I can find a stiff drink.”

  
  
  


Marty finds his drink on the wooden deck of a place with its metal namesake sign gone patina-green with age, but the food is good and the view from their table even better. He nurses on a rum and coke while Rust sips between a sweating beer and a glass of water, peeling the paper label off the former one little bit at a time.

“Probably fix you up with another one of those patches when we get back,” Marty says with a little more gentleness in his tone than usual, watching the breeze card its fingers through Rust’s hair while he pushes a bit of coleslaw around his plate. “Got the box in my bag.”

“Mm,” Rust offers by way of reply, looking across the water lapping along the shore not twenty yards away. He’s in his standard jeans and button-up but has left the top few snaps on his shirt open, letting the low neckline of a white undershirt and sun-kissed skin peek through.

Grey-winged gulls scream at one another as they float along the ocean air and Rust pinches off a bit of untouched hushpuppy to subtly drop under the table, watching a tiny brown finch hop across the deck to peck at it between their feet. The waitress swings by with their check and he picks it up before Marty can make a move, glancing at the total before working his wallet out of his back pocket to leave a wad of cash in the billfold.

“We could walk down to the water for a bit,” Marty says, watching Rust’s fingers fidget around the neck of his beer bottle. “Sun’ll be dropping in about a half-hour or so.”

“Only brought my boots,” Rust says, shifting so the wicker chair creaks under his weight. He pinches off another piece of bread and offers it to the finch, getting it to come a little closer to his hand this time.

“That’s alright,” Marty says with a smile, nudging him under the table. “You can take them off.”  
  
  
  


Rust leaves his socks and boots in the floorboard of the car and bends over to cuff the legs of his jeans, rolling them up a few times to rest around his ankles. Marty waits for him at the front of the car near a patch of reedy beach grass, cotton shirt rippling some in the cooling breeze.  

“I haven’t been down on the gulf like this in years,” he says, letting Rust lead the way down the sandy path from the parking lot that’ll take them to the surf. “Always feels good, being near the water.”

The sinking sun is weaving streaks of lilac and coral along the loom of the horizon and making the water shine like pink lemonade. Rust feels the soft white sand between his toes and relishes a little in the texture as they walk along through the low dunes, taking their time with getting to the water. The gulls are quieter now and the salt in the air smells sweeter than he remembers, teasing an old memory loose that he holds out in a quiet offering for Marty.

“Sophia loved the ocean,” he says, and the words don’t hurt anywhere near as much as he thought they would. “We’d bring her down to the beach in Houston sometimes and she’d run straight for the water if I wasn’t holding on to her.”

Marty’s eyes wander over Rust’s face in the twilight before he lets himself smile. “I remember that picture you showed me,” he says. “The one with the ice cream cone.”

“Mmhmm,” Rust hums, smiling a little himself. “She’d play until she couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore. Claire’d douse her in sunblock and she’d still be brown as a berry by the time we went home.”

He goes quiet after that but it isn’t a bruised kind of silence, filled in with the sound of water birds and a group of children wearing nothing but oversized t-shirts as they laugh and chase one another down to the surf. The rim of the sun finally touches down on the water and Rust and Marty only stop walking when the tide is lapping up around their feet. It feels like a rush of vertigo if Rust looks down and watches it come and go, so he closes his eyes and lets the wind blow through him one easy breath at a time.

When the sun’s halfway gone he feels a hand brush his and when he turns it’s right into the kiss Marty presses soft and light against the corner of his mouth, tickling a little from the rasp of bristly whiskers.

“What was that for?” Rust asks, letting his eyes drop to the other man’s lips. They’re what seems like miles from the closest family but Marty still finds a reason to blush, just enough light left in the sky to find the color in his face.

“Dunno,” Marty says, pressing a footprint into the wet sand. “Reckon I’m just an old romantic.”

“If that were the case,” Rust says, leaning back in close to kiss him full on the mouth, “you wouldn’t have missed.”  
  


* * *  
  
  


Back at the hotel Marty sits propped up in bed with his laptop while the shower runs in the bathroom, scrolling through a slew of emails that’ve stacked up in the work account. He pares through them until the background checks for Peter Munroe and Eli Bellevue come up, pushing his reading glasses higher on the bridge of his nose to scan through the results.

Both men are about as clean as unblown whistles minus an overnight drop in the local sheriff’s drunk tank for Munroe back in ’04. Bellevue is former military with two tours through Afghanistan under his belt and between the two of them they’ve got more than ten years of prior security experience. A photo of Munroe shows him tattooed clear down to the wrists on both arms but he sounded like a preacher’s son on the phone, all _yes sir_ and _that’d be mighty fine_ in a lilting Cajun drawl.

The cracked bathroom door swings open and Rust steps out flushed pink from the shower, picking a pair of boxer briefs up off the edge of the bed before slipping them over his hips. He pads across the room to look down into the parking lot again, pushing damp waves off his forehead while a white truck passes on the street below.

“You hear anything coming from next door?” he asks, turning away from the window. He steps over to the nightstand to pick up his ledger and Marty sees that the nicotine patch has been peeled off and left for dead, probably been gone most of the damn day knowing his luck.

“Not a peep,” he says. He glances at the clock on the corner of his computer screen and it only reads a hair past eleven. “Still a bit early yet, though. Might not be expecting them for a while.”

Rust opens up his notebook but doesn’t settle down on the empty side of the bed, pacing back across the room with a pen cap wedged between his teeth. “I don’t think they’re coming back tonight,” he says, jotting something quick down. “Haven’t been here all day unless we missed them at dinner, and they’ve got the dog with them or else it’d be making a hell of a lot more noise.”

Marty pushes his glasses up on his head and sighs. “Listen,” he says, closing his laptop and setting it on the side table, “I know you’re keyed up something wild right now but we’re running surveillance here, and that’s what you do—you surveil.”

“Surveil what?” Rust snaps. “There ain’t anybody fuckin’ here to watch, Marty.”

He shuts his ledger and throws it down on the desk before dropping into the armchair by the window, one hand coming up to brace over his eyes. “If they’re not back by morning I’m breaking into the room,” Rust says, massaging a thumb and forefinger into his temples. “Ain’t that hard so long as we don’t get caught.”

“Jesus Christ,” Marty sighs. He lets his arms fall and go slack against the bed, watching Rust sit with his eyes still covered. “Break into the fucking room—are you even listening to yourself right now?”

“Yeah, and apparently I’m the only one,” Rust murmurs, wiping a palm over his face before staring glassy-eyed at Marty. “I’m not going to sit around with a thumb jammed up my ass waiting on nothing to bite.” The dark shadows slanting over him make the delicate skin under his eyes look bruised, sockets deepened and rimmed with half-moons the color of overripe plum.

“Alright,” Marty says with a weak wave of one hand, signaling his surrender. “If they don’t show up by morning we’ll be taking different measures. But we ain’t breaking into the fucking room first thing—you can’t jump right to the car battery every goddamn time, we’re running a legitimate business here now.”

They both sit in silence for several long moments, Rust staring at some high point on the wall while his bare chest gently rises and falls. Marty clears his throat and pulls his glasses off his head, setting them down on the abandoned laptop with a muffled clatter.

“You got a headache?” he asks.

Rust makes a vague noise in the back of his throat, lashes dripping shut.

“What was that?”

“Said _yeah.”_

“Well come over here and lay down before I have to tranq your ass,” Marty says, pulling the sheet down on the other side of the bed. “Let me try and work on your neck for a minute, see if that helps some.”

Rust levels him with a bleary look for a second but then pulls himself up out of the chair, slowly padding over to sit on the edge of the bed. Marty twists the lamp off and turns the TV on something with the volume tuned low, tugging one of the extra pillows into his lap.

“Here,” he murmurs, patting the plush white. “Get comfortable.”

Rust shifts around until he’s curled on one side, head pillowed in Marty’s lap with the line of his spine curved and bared in an open offering. His feet are cold so he tucks them up under the sheet and blanket, letting out a deep breath that warms the cotton pillowcase under his cheek.

The light coming from the television makes the room glow a soft, wavering blue, and with the cool air rattling in the window unit it reminds him of the one and only time he ever went to an aquarium, standing in an underground grotto made of painted concrete to watch big-mouthed eels gulp water through their gills. It smelled like cold water and darkness next to the wall of thick glass and Claire had slipped her hand into his for the first time, soft and delicate and alien there.

When Marty’s broad hands cup around the back of his neck to start pressing both thumbs into the knotted tension they don’t feel anywhere near as foreign, calloused palms warm and welcome against his skin.

Rust drifts while Marty works from his neck down to his shoulders, watching the television screen but not really seeing much on it, most of his senses wrapped around the other man’s hands. Marty’s fingertips gradually find their way up into the fine hair at the base of Rust’s neck, gently scratching there before moving to comb through the damp waves on his head.

It feels so good he can feel his body humming like a low note on a tuning fork, making pleasant heat burst syrupy-warm at the base of his neck and melt down through his limbs like the kind of bliss found in a final moment before sleep.

“You feelin’ a little better?” Marty asks, soft words dropping into Rust’s hair as his hand smoothes down his back, doing more petting than any real massaging now.

“Mmhm,” Rust hums after a moment, eyes long since slipped shut. His body feels heavy enough to sink through the mattress and hit the floor but he slowly reaches up and finds one of Marty’s hands, pressing a thumb against the heart of his palm where it rests in the crook between his neck and shoulder. He pulls it down to his mouth and brushes a kiss across the other man’s knuckles before letting go, gently disentangling himself and shifting around until he’s lying next to Marty on the bed.

It doesn’t take long until his breathing evens out and Marty settles down not too soon after, clicking the TV off before carefully tugging the sheet up a little further around Rust’s waist. For the first time in what feels like weeks he sleeps sound without any tossing and turning, and that gives them both the benefit of a good night’s rest.  
  


* * *  
  


“Well, we’ve surely gone and missed all the good danishes and shit,” Marty says the next morning, glancing at his watch while Rust pads out of the bathroom. “Gonna be a fruit and toast kind of morning, if even that at this rate—what the hell are you doing?”

Rust bends to pick up his boots before settling down on the edge of the bed. “Left my ring by the sink,” he says, flashing the band on his hand before pulling on a pair of socks.

“Oh,” Marty says, palming the back of his neck as his mouth screws up into a lopsided smile. He leans one shoulder into the wall while Rust does up his laces, watching his hands work each set into a knotted bow. “You think you wanna put on another patch before we get going today?”

“Can,” Rust says on a small sigh, sitting up to slide his hands down his thighs. “Where’re you keeping the box?”

Once he’s patched up and got his undershirt tucked back in they slip out the door, and Marty hasn’t even got the latch in the jamb before Rust nearly bowls him over trying to get around the cleaning cart parked next door.

The room registered under Fox Renard’s name is wide open and some low singing is coming from inside, a sweet tune that sounds like something in a different language. Marty blinks and another maid steps out of a room across the hall, her brows screwing up when she sees the two men gathered around the open door.

“Is that y’all’s room?” she asks, looking between them. “If you’ve left something inside you can go fetch it real quick, Rosalina don’t mind.”

Rust turns to face her while Marty tries on something akin to a smile, tucking his hands into his pockets. “Oh, no ma’am, we were just—”

“Have you cleaned this room in the past few days at all?” Rust asks, gesturing behind them while his eyes search the maid’s face. The nametag on her uniform says _Darlene ._

“Ain’t my side of the hallway,” Darlene says, shifting her weight over onto one popped-out hip. “And I don’t talk to the police about nothing unless it’s about me or mine, so I can’t help y’all there. Plus you ain’t even showed me your badge yet.”

Marty laughs and holds up a hand like the idea alone is crazy talk, shaking his head. “We’re not police, ma’am,” he says, glancing quickly to his left as Rust disappears into the room. “What gave you that idea?”

Before she can answer they both stop to listen to the conversation coming from inside the room, Rust’s low tones mixed with the same voice that had been singing before.

“¿Buenos días, señorita Rosalina? ¿Puedo hablar con usted un momento?”

“Uh, sí—sí. ¿En qué le puedo servir?”

Marty turns to edge closer to the doorway, leaning out into the hall to check either end for anybody else who might be coming along. “Rust,” he hisses. _“_ _Rust.”_

“Sir,” Darlene says from Marty’s elbow, “if that ain’t your room you can just walk in without permission. Rosalina—Rosalina! Estos dos se traen algo, mejor no digas nada.”

“¿Ha visto a las personas que se hospedan en este cuarto?” Rust asks, not bothering to spare a backward glance while he musters up a small smile for the tiny woman with a pink feather duster in hand. “Un joven y una mujer con un perrito.”

“No,” Rosalina says with a shrug. “Nadie ha tocado nada en los últimos cuatro días. Todo está limpio cada vez que vengo a hacer el aseo, sólo entro a checar para que no me corran. Ya sabe cómo es esto.”

“Sí,” Rust says, turning to catch Marty’s eye with that razor-sharp look on his face, the one that means he’s gone and snagged something good. “Gracias por su tiempo.”

Marty and Darlene both part on either side of the doorway to let him step through, the latter with a sour look on her face and the former reaching out to try and catch hold of Rust’s elbow. Rosalina trails out into the hall with the feather duster still in hand like a dead bird, whispering to her coworker while they both watch the two men saunter away.

“What’d she say?” Marty asks, eyes running wild over Rust’s face. “It doesn’t look like a soul’s been in there in fuckin’ days.”

“That’s because they haven’t,” Rust says, already walking at a good clip for the elevator. He presses the button and steps back when it lights up yellow, watching the numbers on the ticker climb up from the ground. “Told you they ain’t here, don’t think they ever were.”

“Then where the hell are they?” Marty asks, nearly falling in after Rust when the doors slide open. He slumps back against the wall and drags a hand over the top of his head while he curses a vivid blue streak that echoes against the aluminum walls. “Jesus Christ, we walked into that one full blind. Duped to fucking hell and back by a couple of goddamn kids.”

Rust checks his phone screen as the elevator hits the first floor. “That’s usually how it goes,” he says, strolling out into the lobby. “You got the keys?”

“Yeah,” Marty says, falling into step beside him as they walk out into the early-morning sunshine beating down on the parking lot. He drops them into Rust’s hand before angling for the passenger side of the car. “Where you planning on going?”

“For a drive,” Rust says, squinting out across the traffic humming down Beach Boulevard. “They’re somewhere nearby.”

Two blocks down the street Marty blinks and peers at Rust from the corner of his eye. “Why don’t you ever talk like that at home?” he asks, thinking of the way the foreign words had rolled like warm honey off Rust’s tongue.

“Talk like what?”

“You know—Spanish.”

“Never asked me to,” Rust says, checking his blind spot before merging into the left lane. “You wouldn’t know the half of what I was saying anyhow.”

“No,” Marty says with a grunt, watching meringue-piled clouds gather in the distance above the gulf. “But I don’t reckon that part matters too much.”

A small smile pulls at one corner of Rust’s mouth at he looks straight ahead. “You puttin’ in a request?” he asks.

“Maybe,” Marty says, sniffing as he looks up from messing with a button on his shirt. “But I ain’t picky.”

“Alright,” Rust says, going quiet for a few moments. When he finds what he was looking for he doesn’t present it with any explanation or flourish, only lets the words spin out drawled and lazy as fat summer bees. “Mi amor se nutre de tu amor, amada, y mientras vivas estará en tus brazos sin salir de los míos.”

And Marty’s picked up enough Spanish over the years to catch two or three words here and there but he could only hear one standing out clear in whatever Rust had been saying. “You make that up on the fly?” he asks, feeling the back of his neck burn a little warmer.

“No,” Rust says simply. “Pablo Neruda.”

“Well it sounds nice,” Marty says, grinning down into his lap. “Real nice.”  
  


* * *  
  
  


An hour and some change later hasn’t found hide nor hair of Jewel Anastos or Fox Renard, but they’re nearly down to fumes in the gas tank and Marty swears they’ve passed the Biloxi lighthouse a dozen times, standing like a tall white sentinel over the city with its glass-lensed eye.

“I can’t take a minute more of this until we eat something,” he says, standing at a gas station pump overlooking the closest boat marina while gulls wing through the air. “Don’t even know what the fuck we’re doing, driving around God’s creation like this. Need to get back to the hotel, regroup and figure out a better game plan on where we’re canvassing. Probably put a call through to Lucinda Perry and tell her there’s a good chance we’re gonna be here longer than we thought.”

Rust is leaning against the trunk of the Cadillac, biting at a hangnail on his thumb while the warm sea breeze whips around them. “Need to concentrate around the big casino hotels, do some questioning there,” he says, watching a man in white linen stroll around the deck of a yacht in the distance. “Jewel comes from money. Probably likes to spend it, too.”

Marty nods and squeezes the gas pump a few times to round out his number, tapping at the display to bypass the receipt printout. He walks over and fishes the nearby squeegee out of a bucket of murky blue liquid, leaning over the hood of the car to clean the windshield with even strokes.

“We’ll shoot up the main drag later, talk some more with the hotel staff,” he says, slinging water off the squeegee onto the gum-pocked concrete. “But if they’re still here in town I can’t figure why the fuck they’d bother with a decoy room at the Hampton. Don’t make a damn bit of sense.”

“Seems like they didn’t want to leave a straightforward trail of breadcrumbs in case anybody came looking,” Rust says, sauntering back around to the passenger side of the car. “Needed to stay in Biloxi for something. Business, maybe.”

Marty snorts as he folds himself down into the driver seat. “What the hell kind of business does a nineteen-year-old girl and her barely legal boyfriend got to tend to in a tourist town in Mississippi?”

“Don’t know yet,” Rust says, itching to get his hands on the notes scrawled in his ledger. “Let’s get something to eat and head on back to the hotel. Wanna run through the files again, see if we missed anything the first run through.”

The car rolls around to the exit and Marty looks both ways, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. “Where to?” he asks.

“Head back down toward the strip,” Rust says. “Saw a diner there earlier, probably serves up something better than what we could find in a paper bag.”

  
  


“Bad choice,” Marty says forty-five minutes later, cutting his waffle into quarters so warm syrup and melted butter spreads like liquid gold across the plate. “Here I was just starting to trim up again and you go and bring me into a joint like this. Some real sabotage shit.”

“Sacrifices we make,” Rust says, leaving his waffle untouched for the time being while he dashes too much hot sauce on his eggs and picks up a piece of bacon. They’re tucked into a patch-covered red diner booth along the front window with mismatched silverware and a ketchup bottle that looks like it might’ve been manufactured during the moon landing, but the coffee tastes like bitter-black heaven and the hostess had called Marty sugar the minute she laid eyes on him. The sign out front had spelled out _Best Breakfast in Biloxi_ in hand-placed block letters and neither man finds room enough behind his belt to challenge it.

Marty polishes off half a cup of coffee and a fourth of his waffle before he sets his knife down on the edge of his plate, watching Rust from across the table. “Been thinking some about this Alaska thing,” he says, briefly running his tongue along his bottom lip. “About the two of us going up there.”

“What about it?” Rust says, looking up through his lashes with his coffee cup brought halfway to his mouth.

“Well,” Marty says. He reaches across himself to palm his shoulder and pauses for a moment to watch an older couple walk in, white haired and linked arm-in-arm while the man leans heavy on a wooden cane. “When do you think’s a good time to make the trip? We’re in a position now where we gotta plan this shit out in advance, y’know. Take time off at the firm and stuff.”

Rust pushes a bite of waffle through the syrup pooled on his plate, chasing a leftover pat of butter. “Peak season for tourists is in August so we’d do best to avoid that,” he says. “Course the places I’d like to go are a good stretch off the beaten path, but it’s easier to get around without the cruise ships and would-be survivalists fucking around in the woods. Colder later in the year, but then again it’s quieter.”

“Got no complaints about any sort of quiet,” Marty says. “Cold part is something I’m not the most familiar with—haven’t seen ice or snow on the ground since I was about fifteen. Be my luck, we get all the way up there and I fall and break a hip first fuckin’ thing.”

“Naw,” Rust says. “We can plan for September or October, just before the hard snow starts to roll in. Be enough to get your feet wet but not enough to keep us shacked up in the cabin for a full week.”

Marty sits back in the booth with an easy smile playing around his mouth, hands laced loose in his lap under the table. “A cabin, huh?”

“Best way to do it,” Rust says, eyes cast lazy on the smirk curling up the other man’s lips. “I sure as hell ain’t putting your ass up in a five-star hotel. Most of them’ll be shut down for the season by then anyhow.”

The waitress swings by to top off their coffee, both mugs throwing curls of hot steam up into the diner air. Rust pulls his closer between both hands and lets the aroma waft up into his face as he breathes it down deep, just as good as second-rate oxygen.

“Gonna have me up there roughin’ it I suppose,” Marty says with a low laugh. “Living off twigs and berries and chasing grizzly bears through the woods with a bow and arrow. The authentic Rustin Cohle Experience.”

Rust shakes his head, mouth twitching just enough to notice. He thinks about twelve-mile treks through a white-choked forest with forty pounds of gear strapped to his back, the mornings when it was so cold in the cabin his breath fogged when it touched the open air, enough spilled blood to melt virgin snow on the ground. “Not quite,” he says. “But I think we can get a good look at what the place has to offer.”

Marty picks his fork and knife back up to finish off his breakfast, and his next few words come without any of the flippancy or serrated edges they might’ve carried in another life. “The one thing I’ll always be left wanting to know,” he says, “is how the goddamn world looks through your eyes.”

“It ain’t nothing too special,” Rust says, words gone a touch hoarse in his throat. “You aren’t missing much.”

He doesn’t say anything about how the world tends to burn gold when he looks too long at Marty.  
  


* * *  
  


Rust flips through the case file again as they drive down casino alley, thumbing a printed snapshot of Jewel and Fox together at a party. The girl is smiling bright and poised for the camera flash but the boy only has eyes for her, turned so just a hint of his moonstruck expression reads on digital film. Rust scans over the photo a few times before sliding it back in the manila folder in his lap, looking up to watch the city crawl by through the window.

“Like a poor man’s Vegas out here,” he says as they pass another stucco-clad building shaped like a shoebox. Nearly everything along the main boulevard is cast in neutrals, sunbaked bleached cotton and warm paper in his mouth. “All looks the same.”

“I know more than a few people who’d probably fight you for saying that,” Marty snorts, turning into a resort parking lot. “Besides, folks don’t come down here for the fuckin’ scenery—come here to gamble. Long as the poker tables and bars look good I reckon they won’t have a problem staying in business.”

They talk to the desk clerks and a handful of staff at the Hard Rock and Four Points Resort, sliding photos across the counter and asking for Fox by his nickname more often than his given one. It’s slow moving in lunch hour traffic and the staff members at every resort are more concerned with the paying patrons, juggling out directions and brochures and beach towels to their guests before circling back around to Rust and Marty.

At the end of the second hour Marty finds Rust standing at the coin-filled wishing fountain in front of the Beau Rivage, watching water bubble up from the source and trickle down the stone tiers into a wide basin. Money is layered so thick along the bottom it looks like a mosaic of metallic fish scales glinting in the light of the overhead sun.

“No luck on this end,” Marty sighs as he walks up to stand at Rust’s shoulder, immediately reaching down into his pocket to pull a penny free. He rubs it between his thumb and forefinger for a moment and then flips it into the water, a small flash of copper come and gone.

“Waste of a good penny,” Rust says, still peering into the gently rippling water.

Marty tucks both hands back into his pockets, jingling the leftover change and car keys there. “A penny for my peace of mind,” he says. “Never was one to pass up an opportunity for a cheap wish. Better that than dropping a few grand on one of the poker tables they got running inside.”

There are probably a thousand coins lost in the fountain, every one of them cast in with a frivolous hope or dream or prayer wrapped around it. Rust looks at them and wishes he could hear each one through the bubbling of the water, whispered out like a struck chord of star song.

“What makes you think your wish is any more deserving than the rest of them?” he asks, turning to look at Marty’s shoes next to his.

“Never said it was,” Marty murmurs, lightly bumping his shoulder into Rust’s to start the trek back to the car. “But that one wasn’t for me.”

Rust looks up and blinks at the other man’s back before he starts to follow, and halfway across the lot he catches something moving in his peripherals, a pinch of snow white hopping through the front garden as it sniffs around the trimmed lawn.

At first he thinks it’s a vision, cutting his eyes back and forth to try and shake off the solid mirage of what looks like a soft white rabbit. But it doesn’t dissolve or melt into the ground, and when it looks up and barks Rust stops dead where he stands.

“Marty,” he says, trying to keep his voice held even when he sees the girl come around the side of the hotel in a gauzy dress, moving like indigo water around her ankles as she follows in the little dog’s path.

“What?” Marty says, turning to look over his shoulder as he gets a hand on the Cadillac’s door. “It’s damn near a hundred degrees out here, hurry up and get in the—holy _shit .”_

Rust holds a finger up to his lips, shaking his head once as Marty slowly walks back over to him with his eyes stretched wide. “Is that her?” he murmurs close to Rust’s ear, glancing at the young woman again as she stoops to pick up the white dog from where it’d been walking in a bed of summer flowers.

Jewel carries her pet back over to the grass and gently sets it down, hitching her hands up on her hips to dish out a mild scolding. “No potty in the flowers, Malcom,” she says, shaking her head so her brown curls bounce around her shoulders. “That’s bad boy stuff, you know better than that.”

She looks up and smiles a little when she sees Rust and Marty strolling down the walk, then turns to start leading Malcom back through the garden, slowly disappearing the way she came.

“Fuckin’ A,” Marty rasps. “The desk clerk just told me they aren’t checked in.”

“Confidentiality request,” Rust says. “Must’ve asked to be put on the no-call list.”

Marty tips his head back to peer up at the high-rise resort, hundreds of windows looking down on where they stand. “The goddamn Beau Rivage,” he says. “I can’t believe we didn’t think of it before.”

“Think of what?” Rust asks, searching the other man’s face.

“He’s here for the big tournament,” Marty says, pulling the keys out of his pocket as he starts back toward the car. “All bets on Fox being a poker player.”

Rust follows him, not bothering to ask why they’re leaving because he already knows.

“Time to check out at the Hampton,” Marty says, dropping behind the wheel to crank up the engine. “Looks like we’re moving house.”  
  


* * *  
  
  


The foyer of the Rivage opens up into a beautiful atrium the size of a shopping mall, scarlet carpet and marble floors weaving around wide planters that house live trees and flower gardens inside the building. Sunlight filters down through the paneled skylights and spills over a grand piano tucked into a gold settee lounge, a trio of wrought iron gazebos and stained glass fixtures.

“Now this is high class,” Marty says appreciatively, looking around with a new brightness in his eyes. “Like some of that shit you see on the travel channel.”

“Pretty nice,” Rust says, setting his duffel down once they get up to the service desk. The closest attendant is a woman with her blonde hair slicked back into a bun, a satin scarf the color of cardinal feathers delicately tied around her throat. She looks at Marty with familiarity on her face, eyes darting between him and Rust with query budding on her tongue.

“Was there something else I could help you with, sir?” she asks, clasping her hands at her waist.

Marty seems to adopt a more humbled stance, though the gap between his teeth shines all the same when he smiles. “Uh, yes ma’am,” he says. “Turns out we’ll be staying here after all. Be needing a room for the night if you don’t mind, as close to the ground floor as you can manage.”

“Absolutely,” the woman says, though her eyes narrow the smallest fraction while she turns to her computer. “We’re a bit full for the tournament this weekend but I’m sure we can find something suiting. Would you like a double or a single?”

“Single’s fine,” Marty says quietly, though his sights are on the statuesque redhead whisking across the foyer on a pair of patent stilettos. She walks with her back held straight as a rod and steps behind the service desk with ease, straightening the lapels of her blazer with champagne-painted fingers.

“Afternoon, Miss Agatha,” the blonde says while she presses buttons on the computer, looking up when the redhead joins her at the counter. Under her name, the gold plate pinned to her jacket is engraved with _Concierge._

Agatha doles out a pristine smile to Rust and Marty before flipping through a large book she pulls from underneath the desk, gold bracelets faintly jingling around her wrists while she looks. “I’m telling you, Lexi,” she says, licking her thumb before turning to the next page. “These people are running me into the ground. Who in their right mind requests swordfish through room service at two in the afternoon? As if we have one swimming around in the pool out back, ready to slap on the grill.”

She picks up the book and turns away to pick up a pen with a nod and low-murmur of _gentlemen_ _,_ leaning against the back counter while Lexi starts asking for booking information.

“And both names for the room’s key holders?” she asks, looking between Rust and Marty again.

“Uh, Martin Hart and Rustin Cohle,” Marty says, looking through his wallet for the firm’s credit card. “If you could spare two keys that’d be—”

“Did you say Hart and Cohle?” Agatha interrupts, turning on a dime with her lips parted. She searches their faces with a new paleness ghosted across her freckled features, letting out a light gasp. “My Lord, you two are the ones that found that cult killer’s place out in the sticks. The detectives from Louisiana.”

Marty looks like a fish swallowing air for a second but then Rust is stepping forward, placing a hand on the edge of the marble counter. “The cult house and burial ground near Creole Nature Trail back in 2012,” he says, keeping his voice held soft and low. “That was us.”

“I didn’t even recognize you at first, you both look so different,” the woman says, shaking her head in partial disbelief. “I followed that case on the news for weeks—Jesus, we all did. National level stuff. My God, to think that was two years ago now.”

“Sure doesn’t feel like that long,” Marty says with an airy sort of laugh, seeming to have regained his voice despite feeling somewhat lightheaded. “Wow—yeah.”

Agatha blushes a bit and takes a step back, reaching up to fiddle with the ends of her hair. “Well, anyhow,” she says, clearing her throat. “It’s nice to meet you in person. That was such a big thing, you know…you brought so many families closure after so many years. For what it’s worth coming from a stranger, a lot of us appreciate your service.”

“We were just finishing a job we had to see done, ma’am,” Marty says. “But—uh, thank you all the same.”

There’s a momentary silence that breaks when Lexi blinks and starts typing at the computer again, still trying to put Rust and Marty’s information into the system. “So a standard single…?” she starts to say, but then Agatha waves her hand, the movement looking like the swish of a magic wand through the air.

“Would you look at that,” she says, thumping the computer screen with her nails. “A suite just opened up on the club level and not a solitary soul’s got a reservation claim on it. I think something like that would make you a lot more comfortable, don’t you think?”

Rust seems to catch on before Marty does, trying to head her off at the gate. “That’s awfully kind of you, ma’am, but we can’t accept a thing like—”

“No acceptance needed,” Agatha says. “It’s the first room we have available and just so happens to be set at the same price as a standard. Chalk it up to nothing more than sheer blind luck of the draw.”

She urges Lexi aside and types something else into the computer, taking Marty’s credit card from across the counter with a smile. “Truth be told,” she adds, “it couldn’t have happened to better people.”

  
  


The first thing Marty does when Rust shuts the suite door behind them is let out a low whistle, looking around the spacious room with eager eyes while his duffel drops to the floor. The second thing he does is flop down on the oversized king bed, sinking into the soft comforter done up in shades of cream and gold.

“Who would’ve thought we’d end up in the lap of luxury,” he says, spreading his arms out wide through the sheets like a snow angel. “This bed feels like a fucking dream.”

Rust hooks their dress shirts in the closet next to a pair of robes hanging there and sets his own bag down, slowly venturing through the rest of the room. There’s a granite-topped kitchenette with an open fridge and minibar, a high-backed armchair by the draped windows and a furnished sitting room flanked by a breakfast nook. The bathroom has a deep garden tub and a shower sealed off with a tall glass door, the water raining down from a wide spout fanned out overhead.

“The flat screen in here’s bigger than the one we got at the house,” Marty murmurs, picking up the remote to click on the TV. “Talk about inadequacies of reality, Jesus Christ.”

“Club level gets a discounted rate at the hotel restaurant and access to a private lounge,” Rust says, settling down at the desk to flip open his ledger and the files they toted along. “Good chance our party is gonna be taking advantage of the perks if they’re here for poker.”

Marty flips through a few channels on the TV, shaking his head at the crystal-quality picture before laying out flat to close his eyes against the high ceiling. “You know what I think?” he says, tipping his head toward Rust.

“Hmm?”

“Thinkin’ our best bet for a surveillance spot is a table for two at this high-flown restaurant downstairs.”

Rust makes a warm noise in the back of his throat. “That so?” he drawls, looking down to add an annotation to something in his notebook. “I suppose for stakeout gear you’re thinking something like a bottle of wine and an order of prime rib.”

“Baby,” Marty says with a crooked smile, “you must’ve read my mind.”  
  


* * *  
  


The low hum of live piano music and murmured conversation hangs like soft smog in the air, something that warms Rust just as much as the lone glass of wine he’s had since sitting down. Marty’s smile is bright enough for the both of them and that helps, too, giving him something to look at when the rest of the restaurant blurs into background noise.

“You sure do clean up pretty for somebody without a vain bone in his body,” Marty says, and it’s only then that Rust realizes the other man had been looking at him.

“Matter of opinion,” Rust says, even though his mouth quirks a little when he does. He picks up a roll from the bread basket and pulls a bite off, eyes straying to the candle flame flickering on the table between them.

“Well I reckon my opinion outweighs yours since I’m the one who’s got to sit here and look at you,” Marty murmurs, like it’s some kind of chore he’s been burdened with. He glances up quick and then away again, thumbing along the side of his nose. “That blue’s a good color on you, though—always has been if memory serves.”

Rust remembers the blue jacket and its fraternal twin in brown, the both of them found on a secondhand store rack in Baton Rouge. Corduroy shades of dark water and warm earth like two familiar elements in the raw. In the end they’d gone full circle, returned back to the same donation house they’d been pulled from after a seven-year samsara.

Marty bought the shirt he’s wearing now, presented as a non-gift without much fanfare or comment. Rust looks down at it like he needs to taste the color again, fingers lightly brushing the fabric buttoned over his stomach. “I like it,” he says, because he does. “Thank you.”

Their waiter brings out two salads and Rust watches Marty in kind, how he twists the ring on his right hand before reaching for the pepper shaker, the way he straightens his silverware and picks up the wrong fork. The shirt he’s wearing matches the silver in his beard but it isn’t a cold color on Marty, who always managed to burn so warm, all pink-toned skin and blue eyes more summer cornflower than ice.

“Be keeping an eye out,” Marty says, breaking into Rust’s thoughts. He stabs one last forkful of salad and scans across the sea of faces seated around them, shadowed by soft chandelier and candlelight. “Sure we’ll catch sight of them again. If not tonight, then definitely on the casino floor tomorrow.”

Rust nods, pushing a slice of radish to the edge of his plate. “Strange kinda thing, this report we’ll be feeding back to Lucinda Perry. Don’t feel like there’s gonna be much to it.”

“Lax as you are to believe it, there’s a good chance she just wants to know her kid’s not dead in a ditch somewhere,” Marty says, sliding a pointed look across the table. “You still thinking she’s got some bad-blooded motivation?”

“Maybe,” Rust says, clocking their waiter as he steps out of the kitchen across the dining room with a loaded serving tray. “Considering we hardly know fuck-all, I haven’t written it off just yet.”

“I’d have that pen at the ready,” Marty says, sliding Rust a lazy wink as their food touches down on the table. “Just in case.”

The conversation dips and wanes away from work after that, straying around other things with the kind of ease Rust couldn’t have placed in another life. Marty talks about getting a playpen for Lilah since she’s finally outgrown her bassinet, Audrey’s upcoming gallery showing across the southern border in Texas, the kind of flowers he’d like to plant in the yard somewhere inside the coming weeks—Louisiana iris and bright-faced marigolds, nothing too la-di-da. He tells a story Rust’s never heard before about the big white frog Maggie found in the toilet when she was eight months pregnant with Audrey, already fighting laughter before the first word even leaves his mouth.

“It was three o’clock in the fucking morning, I’m dead to the world and I hear her hollering up a storm in the bathroom like the whole house is falling down around us,” Marty says, voice cracking at the edges. “Run in there to flip on the light and she’s got her panties around her ankles with the edge of her nightgown all wet, hopping like a hobbled jackrabbit and screaming about something alive in the toilet. Didn’t know what the hell I was up against.”

“How’d she figure it was in the toilet?” Rust asks, biting into the grin pulling wider around his mouth, so foreign there it almost hurts.

“It jumped—oh Lord, it’d jumped up when she sat down and smacked her right in the ass,” Marty says, face gone bright red now. “Scared her so bad she dropped her nightgown in the toilet. Thing was the size of a fuckin’ grapefruit but she wouldn’t let me flush it, made me fish him out with a goddamn soup ladle.”

Marty wipes tears of delight away from his eyes while he reshelves the memory and Rust can’t help but laugh right along with him, feeling the other man’s mirth thrum warm and easy in his bones.

“Wish you could’ve seen it for yourself,” Marty says, letting out a soft _hoo_ while his voice comes back to normal. “Maggie’s ears are probably burning like fire the next state over right now. She’d strike me dead for telling that.”

He smiles dopey and crooked across the table at Rust, eyes and face bright and vibrant and alive. The story wasn’t about him, Rust realizes—but it was for him. For the two of them, caught here together in this little wedge of time and place.

And somewhere seventeen or more years in the past he wouldn’t have foreseen a moment like this, couldn’t have divined it from the static spider web of overwrought tension and enmity stretching through the cab of an old Honda. Years before that he still wouldn’t have felt or known much of anything like it save for the spun-sugar words and laughter of a little girl taking to the air like pink butterflies. Small and fragile, just a fleeting taste of human connection beyond the lifelong thing already carved into the ribs around his heart.

Sometimes Rust wishes he could talk to her now, listen to her voice, get to know the woman she would’ve become. Ask if she still loved the ocean as much as he remembers, see if her hair darkened like Claire’s or stayed the color of a southern autumn like his. Learn if she ever outgrew her fear of the dark, even though he figures that last part must be true.

He’d found her there, after all.

But Marty’s here now and he means something, means something in a way Rust doesn’t know he’s ever felt before. It scares him sometimes, the weight of it, the gravity of a gold-dipped tether he’d found so late and unexpected in life. One he doesn’t want to let go of—at least not anymore.

And they both know you can’t make a ruined lark sing again, but maybe it turns out you can keep it caged long enough to mend its broken wing. Rust’s flight feathers healed up fine, in the end. But he never did find a good enough reason to stretch them wide enough to wing away through the open door.

By that time, he hadn’t wanted to.

  
  
  


Marty’s standing at the polished oak bar, angled in such a way that he’s got a wide open view of the club lounge. High rollers and middle-aged couples on their yearly vacation alike mill about with cocktails and wine glasses in hand, draped over each other’s arms and the backs of chaise lounges. A few of the younger crowd are perched at the bar in slim-fit suits and cocktail dresses, knocking back shots and letting ice clink in their drained scotch glasses. Rust is somewhere out of sight, likely checking the shadows and private enclaves for the likes of their would-be targets.

An attendant slides down to Marty’s end of the bar and asks what he’s ordering, and he’s two full glasses of red wine into a good buzz but he orders a whiskey anyhow, sipping slow and steady while his eyes wander across the room. Another piano player is set up at a baby grand by the window, playing something slow and sultry by memory, his hands on the keys like an ivory-skinned lover.

The stage is set when Rust cuts back through the room, people parting around him with ease as if they’re made of water. He moves with a certain sort of grace despite never meaning to, light and silent on his feet like something kindred with a tawny panther. Marty blinks and Rust is already at his side, stepping into his space and bringing a rush of familiar warmth and smell.

“You see anything?” he asks close to Marty’s shoulder, bracing one forearm on the bar.

“Not yet,” Marty says, sucking a breath through his teeth after his next swallow of whiskey. He thumbs around the edge of the glass and slides it in front of Rust, keeping his hand held around the base. “You drinking anymore tonight?”

Rust turns back to face Marty, eyes cut low to the glass. “Wasn’t planning on it,” he says, reaching out after a moment to let his fingers skim the other man’s. “Maybe just a taste.”

He brings the whiskey to his lips and lets his lashes dip against the burn in his throat, and when the glass clinks back down on the bar there’s a young woman in a dress the color of emeralds sitting two seats away, the glittering swathe of fabric slit clean up to her thigh. She looks like her namesake under the low lighting, brown hair swept up and away from her face with long golden earrings almost brushing her bare shoulders.

Marty stiffens up the slightest bit next to him but Rust turns closer, murmuring soft against his ear. “Play the part,” he says, reaching up to briefly run a hand down the small of Marty’s back. “I’ll be watching for Fox.”

He steps away in one fluid motion, a black and blue shadow moving across the room before he disappears.

Jewel’s eyes linger in the space where Rust was, now darting up to find Marty’s face. Her painted lashes fall into a blink and she smiles as she turns her face away to look straight ahead at the bar, more in bashful politeness than any real recognition.

Marty drains the rest of the whiskey from his glass, lips resting right where Rust’s had been just a few moments before. He clears his throat and tries to let his voice carry over to her without being too loud. “He’s my partner,” he says with a practiced smile of his own, waiting until she looks up again. “Been together—well, just about twenty years now.”

It’s a lie, in the real sense, but Marty tells it anyway. He expects to feel a spike of heat shoot through his stomach but doesn’t worry too hard when it never comes.

The bartender brings Jewel a can of lemon-lime soda and a glass filled with ice and a splash of grenadine. She watches him pour out a Shirley Temple in front of her before she turns back to Marty, plucking the maraschino cherry from the top of her drink and biting it off the stem.

“That’s a pretty long time,” she says warmly enough, keeping the cherry stem held between two fingers. The other hand rests in her lap, clasping a slim black handbag held there. “Are you two on vacation or here playing in the tournament?”

“Just here celebrating our anniversary,” Marty says as he accepts a refill on the whiskey. He settles back on a stool, leaving two open seats between them. “How about yourself? Can’t imagine you’re here alone.”

Jewel laughs like music and crosses one leg over the other, leaning forward to take a sip of her drink. Marty considers the lipstick prints left around her straw and thinks of bygone moments like this, ones outside the guise of work or maybe even not, back when he had a different motive in mind and didn’t fall in bed next to another man at the end of each night.

It’s dizzying for a moment, thinking about how much shit changes. How it keeps changing. He wonders if he’d recognize himself, sitting across a shade of who he was twenty years ago.

An old man and his reflection.

“Oh no,” Jewel finally says, angling her body toward Marty now. “I’m here with my boyfriend—he’s gonna be playing again in the tournament tomorrow. We’ve kinda made a vacation of it, though. Little getaway I guess.”

“Can’t imagine what somebody your age needs to get away from,” Marty says, playing it off like something for a laugh. “Boy, what I’d give to be young and carefree again.”

He smiles and mulls that over with another sip of his drink. “Well, just not as stupid maybe.”

“You’d be surprised at the shit young people have to put up with,” Jewel says with a snort, eyebrows comically high on her forehead. She glances briefly across the lounge and then down into her lap, nails busy picking at a sequin on her dress. “I just needed to get away from home for a little while after graduating, you know? Take a break from things. It’s hard to think when you’ve got a million people breathing down your neck, trying to get a hand in on your next move. Like—stifling.”

Marty nods with as much empathy as he can scrounge up and wonders if he’s pulling threads too quickly, if she’ll lose interest or grow uncomfortable, get up and walk away and let it all unravel around them. A prickle of hot sweat gathers between his shoulder blades and he tries not to think about how he always had more success talking to hardened men in a four-walled box than young women who never needed him to listen.

“Seems like your boyfriend is taking good care of you in the meantime,” he says, stammering a bit as he stumbles through his next thought. “Not that—well, not that you aren’t taking care of yourself, y’know. Seem pretty damn capable on your own.”

Jewel draws another sip off her Shirley Temple. “Sure wish my mom thought along the same lines as you,” she says with a small laugh. “She thinks Fox is the devil incarnate and still refuses to cut me off the umbilical, but I think we manage pretty well for ourselves.”

“She doesn’t approve of your relationship?” Marty asks, surprised by the softness in his own voice.

“That’s a big part of the reason why I’m here,” Jewel admits, shrugging a little. “I love Fox—I’ve been dating him for three years if you can believe it. But she’s never liked him, never would’ve let me go anywhere with him like this even though I’m an adult now.”

She straightens up on her stool and laughs nervously, one hand reaching up to straighten a pin in her hair. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be sitting here telling you all this stuff. You didn’t go on vacation to be a barroom therapist.”

Marty clears his throat and abandons his whiskey glass, bracing both elbows on the bar to lace his fingers together. “Just because somebody don’t approve doesn’t mean you gotta break that love to please them,” he says. “It ain’t about anyone and anything but you and what you want.”

Jewel watches him for a moment in silence, letting her lashes sink low. “I’m sorry, but—you just remind me of someone. Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” Marty says, trying to keep the unease pulled off his face.

The girl doesn’t look around for Rust but they both know who she’s talking about. “What would you do if somebody tried to take him away from you?”

The question goes in one ear and out the other before Marty really hears it, and when he does he feels his stomach drop like a lead bowling ball. Thunder groans inside an evoked memory but in the real moment, he knows, he could only hear white noise screaming in his head—like one high note climbing higher and higher until there was nothing else but fear driving a railroad spike through his body.

He remembers standing at the mouth of the hallway with his gun drawn, staring right into Rust’s eyes while Lark Dufresne smiled and readied to pull the trigger. Everything had slammed into him at once but later he’d known each feeling for what it was inside that single moment: anger, coursing like red lighting through his body. Overwhelming fear and love, the two twined together like twin snakes around the caduceus.

And then steadfast certainty, as dogged and resolute as anything he’d ever upheld in his whole damn life, that he would die for Rust. For him or with him, one of the two, and when his mind had been made up inside that last split second it’d been peaceful, almost. Knowing that he was charging into the path of a loaded gun for the man who meant almost everything.

“I wouldn’t let them,” Marty tells Jewel, blinking back into the bar lounge with a long-drawn breath. “I couldn’t. I’d fight tooth and nail right down to the bitter end for him, because without him—well.”

He trails off but Jewel nods like she knows, a calm and sage expression drawn on her pretty face.

“I ran,” she says, simple as that. “Not forever—but just long enough to buy some time. To make my point, maybe, about what I wanted.”

“Sometimes you’ve got to,” Marty says, swallowing against the thickness in his throat. “I’ve done the same before plenty of times. But other times you gotta fight, and you’ll know when that time comes.”

Benjamin Renard walks up to the bar, then, and just like his girlfriend’s namesake it’s not so hard to see how he ended up with the nickname Fox. He’s tall and lean with short-cropped brown curls that shine red under the lounge’s lighting, and when he glances fast at Marty his eyes are like two brown almonds.

He orders a drink and is speaking in low tones with Jewel when Marty feels a familiar presence at his side, sliding into the open seat at his left.

“Small world,” Rust says, quiet enough that Marty feels his words more than he hears them. And then one of Rust’s long-fingered hands is brushing his hip as he leans in closer, nose skimming the soft spot behind Marty’s ear. “Kid took the dog out for his girl, left it with a sitter and checked their dinner reservation. Caught him coming back in a few minutes ago.”

“Looks upstanding enough,” Marty says, trying not to let his eyes linger too long on the younger couple. “Better than me at that age.”

Rust hums in his chest a bit, letting a warm breath loose as his line of sight flickers toward Jewel.  “What do you think about her?”

Marty worries the corner of his lip for a moment, weighing the heaviest thoughts fluttering around in his head. “Poised, thoughtful,” he says, still quiet. “Mature for her age. Talked to her for a bit while you were gone. She, uh—well, she knows what she wants.”

“Hmm,” Rust says, and then slowly turns when Fox’s voice carries over to them with purpose.

“Jewel says you two are here celebrating your anniversary,” the young man says, hopping up onto the stool next to his girlfriend before offering an easy smile as he waves the bartender over. “Could we buy you a round of drinks?”

Rust’s eyes swerve to the side of Marty’s face but the other man is already laughing. “Son,” he says, “the both of us were drinking ten years steady before you were even born. We tend to go lighter on the bottle these days but that’s awfully kind of you to offer.”

“I’ve gotta insist,” Fox says just as the bartender sets a pair of cocktails down the bar in front of them. “I’m having the same, it’s just a little bit of something to wet your whistle before dinner.”

“Well then,” Marty says, picking up his own glass and tipping it in their direction. “To health and happiness and twenty more years of something good.”

Fox wraps an arm around Jewel’s waist and raises his glass in a mirror sort of image. “To love,” he says, plain as anything, and then toasts his glass against his girlfriend’s before taking a long drink.

Rust’s movements are slower but he reaches forward and palms the cocktail meant for him, drawing it closer before pulling the stirring straw out and setting it aside on a napkin. He picks his glass up and holds it out, waiting until Marty leans forward with his own to clink them together.

“What are we drinking to?” Marty murmurs, a little smile curling up around the rim of his glass.

“A closed case,” Rust says, hissing a little around the sourness of his drink. He looks up into Marty’s eyes, watching him through his lashes. “I know you don’t have the heart to turn her in to her mother. I can see it spelled clear across your face.”

“Shit,” Marty snorts, but the longer Rust looks the warmer his cheeks get. He sets his drink down after a dragging moment and wipes a hand over his mouth, shaking his head as he lowers his voice again. “God damn it. What the fuck are we going to tell Lucinda Perry?”

Rust slides off his barstool and holds out a hand to steady Marty while he does the same. “Don’t know yet,” he says. “But I’m sure we’ll think of something.”

Jewel’s eyes find Marty’s as they go to walk out of the lounge, shining like dark emeralds when she smiles. His feet carry him closer on impulse and she reaches out to touch his shoulder when he’s standing in front of her.

“You remind me of my dad a little bit, is who it was,” she says, shyness pulling around the tilt of her mouth. Rust reaches out to take Fox’s hand with a short nod and Marty feels unsteady under the slight spell of alcohol and maybe something else, but he reaches up to lightly touch her fingers before stepping away.

“You two have a good night,” he says, staying close to Rust as they follow the red carpet back out into the lobby.  
  
  


* * *  
  


Marty showers alone while Rust stands at the broad vanity, slanted up against the sink with his toothbrush in hand. He has his back turned and Marty watches the muscles in his shoulders flex and shift while he works, the way he balances the ball of one foot on top of the other with one heel pressed against the fine bone in his shin.

“Guess we’re checking out in the morning,” Marty says, watching soap slide off his arms and shoulders beneath the hot spray. “Less you feel like sticking around to watch the tournament for a little while.”

Rust bends to rinse his mouth out, pressing his face into a soft white hand towel. “Naw, we can head out early,” he says, pushing his fingers through the damp waves on his head before turning around to lean back against the sink. “Cards never interested me much.”

When Marty blinks water out of his eyes he sees Rust watching him, lids cast sleepy with his arms crossed over his chest. The shower is made up of three planes of unfrosted glass set against a marble wall and he isn’t quite used to being naked under Rust’s gaze like this, not performing anything in tandem but merely standing in as the newfound point of interest. The other man’s softened eyes don’t often burn with caustic scrutiny these days but he still feels strangely vulnerable, sometimes, like Rust can see something deeper than just his bare skin.

“You gettin’ a good eyeful?” Marty murmurs, trying to brush off the darting pinch of shaky warmth in the pit of his stomach. “Shame it’s only worth about as much as a backwater nickel show.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Rust drawls, though he pushes away from the vanity and slowly pads across the floor before disappearing into the other room.

Marty steps out of the shower and dries off, keeping the towel fisted at one hip as he trails from the bathroom. Rust is still naked as anything, sprawled out on one side of the big white bed with his stomach gently rising and falling under easy breaths. The TV is black and his eyes follow Marty’s movements, one hand idly trailing across the sheet bunched up under his thighs.

“It’s too bad we’re only here the one night,” Marty says, bending to dig around for a pair of boxers in his duffel bag. “Could get used to staying in a place as nice as this.”

Rust lowers his eyes and draws one foot up through the bedding so his knee’s bent, letting out a quiet sigh. “Spaces like this always got a liminal sort of feeling to them,” he says. “Fleeting, transitory. Like there’s a sense of surrealism hanging at the edges of the room.”

“Sometimes I think you ought to take up another job somewhere,” Marty says, dropping his towel to step into a pair of boxers. “Teach social theory of the infernal plane at some highfalutin university. Make some real money so we can buy some fucking sheets with a quality thread count.”

Rust doesn’t move but the corner of his mouth twitches up on one side. “Have to go back and get a degree first,” he says. “You gonna put me through school?”

“Hell no,” Marty says, hanging his towel up before walking over to the little kitchenette. “I’d miss your ass too much.”

He searches around in the fridge for a moment, sizing up the contents stocked inside. There’s a whole minibar and variety of snack foods, soda and candy bars and even a few sealed containers of fresh fruit.

“Look at this shit,” Marty says, picking up and shaking a little cup of sliced lime and lemon wedges. “Tequila, vodka, couple little shooter bottles of rum—we could have ourselves a party right here in the room.”

“Gotta pay extra for all that,” Rust murmurs, cracking an eye open.

“We do not,” Marty says, grabbing a handful of bottles and some fruit to dump on the counter. “You didn’t hear that concierge lady? Whole thing’s included in the flat rate for club level. I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna be taking advantage.”

He uncaps a small bottle of tequila and takes a cursory whiff before setting it down to pop open the lemon and lime wedges. Another plunder through the fridge turns up a few cans of soda and some juice but nothing looks like anything tempting.

“Not any of my usual mixers,” Marty laments, gently kneeing the door shut before turning around to search for the laptop. “Maybe we can pull something good up real quick.”

Over on the bed Rust pushes his arms above his head and stretches with a tight little noise in his throat, pushing one heel down through the sheets. The muscles in his stomach shift and pull taut before relaxing into something softer, leaving him laid out long and languid, one bony hip cocked up at an angle. Save for the scars and old ink and little paunch of softness at his middle he almost looks like someone pulled from a painting, poured out across the bed in a dash of pale gold.

Marty considers this for a moment and then smiles wicked, turning to pluck a pair of liquor bottles off the counter alongside a lemon slice. He walks over to the bed as casually as he can, looking down at the lounging man and clinking the glass together in one hand until he opens his eyes.

“What are you doin’?” Rust murmurs, one hand brushing across his own stomach. “That shit ain’t even good for a buzz. I’m done for the night.”

“Good, leaves more for me then,” Marty says, kneeling down next to the bed at Rust’s side. “Lay back for me, babe, I wanna try something.”

There’s that telltale moment where the air charges up a little more between them, being this close with the sound of their breath mingling warm, and damn if it doesn’t make Marty’s cock twitch in his shorts.

“Like what?” Rust asks, drawing out a slow blink.

“Like sit pretty and put this lemon in your mouth,” Marty says, holding up the yellow fruit in question. “Reckon if I can’t mix this shit with something good we’re gonna have a little fun along the way.”

“Hate to break it to you, Marty,” Rust drawls after a long moment of quiet, eyes resting casual on the lemon, “but this ain’t Coyote fuckin’ Ugly. All you’re fixing to do is make a mess.”

“I’d have lost my right nut just now, betting against you having seen that shit,” Marty says, snorting out a laugh. He unscrews the closest bottle and dabs a little on the tip of his tongue, making a vaguely pinched face. “Yeah, needs a little bit of something sweet to chase it down. Never done this on somebody without tits before but I think we can get the job done.”

Rust lets out a low swear but straightens himself on the bed anyways, laying out long and flat. His cock is still soft where it rests against one thigh but his stomach twitches a little, contracting under nothing but the weight of Marty’s gaze.

“I’ve snorted blow off a prost’s ass but I ain’t ever done a thing like this,” Rust says, letting his eyes slip shut again. “College boy shit.”

“Dunno,” Marty says, slowly tipping the bottle so a little splash dribbles out onto Rust’s stomach. “Maybe you’ve been missing out.”

It’s barely more than a taste and the move ain’t anything pretty but he leans forward and sucks it off the other man’s skin, letting the flat of his tongue skim low enough that it grazes the tip of a long pink scar.

The noise Rust makes is so small Marty almost misses it, just the tiniest little hitch in his breathing. He doesn’t move save for his fingertips, pressing down deeper into the white sheets.

“Not too bad for a test run,” Marty says, humming around the smile on his lips as he watches the other man. “You wanna keep on?”

“Ain’t bothering me none,” Rust says, face and voice as smooth as the surface of an unbroken lake.

“Alright then,” Marty says, reaching over with the lemon wedge until Rust parts his lips enough to take it. “Open wide, cowboy. Hold that there for a second.”

There’s a hot chance any third party looking in would find this something laughable but Marty doesn’t spare any of that a second thought, only tips a mouthful of tequila out onto Rust’s stomach and chases it downhill, slurping up a line of booze from the man’s sternum all the way down to his navel. It’s messy and Rust’s hips jerk when the tip of Marty’s tongue skims the soft skin under his bellybutton, sending a little stream of liquid down to dampen the sheets.

Marty doesn’t pay that any mind, only sits up and leans toward Rust with his throat burning and gently bites the lemon out of his mouth, sucking yellow bitterness down while Rust stares up at him with his pupils blown black and wide.

“Shit,” Marty says after he spits the lemon out, gone a little breathless. “Hitting me a little faster than I thought.”

“You still got the rest of that bottle left,” Rust says, voice threaded with a hint of something hoarse. “Don’t be stoppin’ just yet.”

Marty climbs to his feet with some ado and rubs the places where the carpet had been burning his knees before straddling across Rust’s legs. The other man’s torso is shining damp in the light and Marty thinks there’s too much of Rust and not enough booze left to pull this off right, but he’s never been one to give up easy.

The next shot makes it down to the crease of Rust’s thigh and he hisses something filthy when Marty’s mouth lingers there, working hot and wet against the soft skin while his whiskers scratch up a new pink heat. There’s a vein standing out against the taut muscle that starts low on Rust’s belly and Marty follows it like a guideline, dragging his mouth back up to kiss and bite a path along the puckered scar that leads to the blue tattoo on Rust’s chest.

“Marty,” Rust groans, squirming around now with his hands struggling to find weak purchase on the other man. “Just touch me already, fuck.”

“The hell do you think I’m doing?” Marty rasps, and they’re making a goddamn mess but he empties the last little mouthful of tequila out onto Rust’s chest and chases it up to the tiny dip at the base of his throat. He sucks a red flame into the skin there and Rust nearly bucks him off he jerks so hard, and from where he’s bowed over Marty can feel the hard line of his cock pressing like a promise into his stomach.

When he sits back up the room starts to shudder and spin around him and Marty tries to blink through it but can feel himself leaning off to one side, slowly getting pulled down under the weight of a tequila-fueled head rush.

“Christ,” he says, collapsing onto the bed next to Rust in a bleary-eyed heap. “Just—give me a second to catch my breath, I’m gettin’ too old for this shit.”

But Rust doesn’t go still or wait, swearing low and twisting around in the sheets until he’s sprawled out on his stomach instead. His senses are crosswired and doubling back on one another and he needs more, needs to let go, overwhelmed and aching with the gentle burn of Marty’s mouth teasing every trip wire on his body. The first whisper of cotton friction against his cock is as sweet as a dream and any of his normal restraint snaps through him like a broken rubber band with one good rut against the mattress, breaking free when he reaches down to start thrusting into his own hand.

Rust moans once and pants against the pillow going damp under his mouth, legs and toes starting to cramp up as he braces himself to go faster. He’s humping the mattress outright and each thrust leaves his back arching low, making the bed whine and squeak with the force of it.

A fleeting few moments of watching this and Marty feels like he’s been shocked back into his senses, sobered up enough that he can scramble up through the sheets and get his hands around Rust’s hips. The other man gasps at the contact and his rhythm stumbles, stalling out and dying mid-thrust.

“M-Marty,” Rust pants, drawing his knees up underneath himself to push his ass further into the air. He keeps his face pressed down in the bedding, hands splayed on either side with the cording in his forearms pulled tight and straining. “Marty, I need you to—”

“Be patient,” Marty says, smoothing his palms down the plane of Rust’s back before drawing them up to wrap around his hips. He knows what he wants, knows Rust is willing to let him have it when he leans in to press a kiss to the small of the other man’s back and another to the untouched white of one thigh, reaching down to cop a tight handful of his ass.

Rust’s dick is still aching and heavy between his legs but he doesn’t touch himself now, only digs his fingers into the sheets and makes a sound like he’s been shot when Marty spreads him open and licks a burning stripe from his taint all the way up to his tailbone.

“Fuck, _fuck,_ _”_ Rust groans, already rocking back against Marty’s face when his tongue first pushes inside, hot and wet against the delicate skin there.

And Rust could let himself get taken apart like this, would let Marty break him down to nothing with his hands and his mouth and his clever tongue—and he’d be the only one to have ever done it, the only one who’d ever known Rust like this. Always had been, always would be.

Marty works Rust with his mouth for as long as he can, feeling the other man’s whimpers and moans run like heat currents down to his own erection tenting up in his boxers. His beard has chafed Rust’s ass red and his jaw is starting to ache when the other man draws up and away without warning, twisting around quick as a flash to push Marty back onto the bed.

“Jesus, Rust,” Marty says, but he lets himself get coaxed back until he’s sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him, heart and stomach fluttering in anticipation.

“Get rid of these,” Rust says, tugging down the waistband of Marty’s underwear until his dick is free. He scrambles up into Marty’s lap and maneuvers around with his hands and hips until he’s straddling the hard length of him, wedged along the crack of his ass while his own cock stays caught between them.

Rust starts in on a slow ride that was never destined to last, burning down a fast fuse when Marty takes him in hand and starts working him steady. The even friction’s so good he can’t hardly focus enough to keep rolling his hips and all he can do is wrap his hands around the back of Marty’s neck and hold on tight, the both of them swearing and rocking together like two ships caught in a maelstrom—

—battered and ragtag but always crashing through the storm in a tangled wreck, not letting go until they finally, finally drag each other headlong into the light.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Rust opens his eyes to the sound of water running steady, echoing from the open bathroom in a lulling kind of trance. Marty’s side of the bed is empty next to him and he blinks in the barely-risen daybreak, still a dove-soft grey where it’s slanting in from between a part in the curtains.

He stretches until his back pops and sits up to swing both legs around so his toes touch carpet, letting them briefly curl into the softness there before climbing to his feet. He walks naked from the bedroom onto the cold marble tile, the chill there sending goosebumps skittering up his calves and thighs until he sees Marty standing in the shower. The other man is facing away with the hot water raining down from above, running over his shoulders and the twin dimples thumb-pressed into the small of his back.

Rust takes a quick piss and then pads over to the shower, easing the door open to step inside and latch it behind him. Marty glances over his shoulder and smiles, sleepy and warm, but doesn’t do anything more than move a little to one side so Rust can join him beneath the falling water.

It’s too early to talk so they don’t, at least not with any spoken words, soaping up and washing off before their hands find one another and pull close, following familiar routes over slick skin with wandering mouths and searching fingers.

There’s a moment where they allow themselves to go still, leaning heavy into one another while the hot water laps over their bodies and pools around their feet. It’s the kind of intimacy that feels like it shouldn’t be so easily caught, something sacred and pulled like a loose thread from the silver linings of things dreamed up alone in the dark. Marty thinks about the crumbled ruins of his past lives and then the unbroken one he’s standing in now, whether it’s a mural painted on boulders or eggshells. He wonders, too, how he ended up inside this moment, all his joints and edges pressed to fit flush against the body of another man.

But then again, it never would’ve been just any man. And he’d only been hard-won through a pool of blood and a decade-wide rift of unmended pain.

If Marty were to ask, Rust would probably compare their story to how Pisces wedged itself into the wheel of the zodiac, spinning out the myth about two different souls who transformed into the twin fishes, jumping together toward the stars to outrun the maw of something dark and ugly.

Marty looks at the water beading in Rust’s eyelashes, the softly crooked shape of his mouth, the freckles dusted like faint specks of his namesake across his chest and shoulders. He weathered two decades in a job spent paring for the finer details in people and yet he’s never looked at another man this close, never been caught up in the spell of actually goddamn wanting to.

Rust’s the kind of imperfect that Marty can’t match, still as handsome as he was in their younger years—just gone a little greyer and softer at the edges, fine-lined now with crow’s feet and a thin scar that dimples under his eye when he smiles. And maybe it isn’t fair that the scales tipped so uneven, that Marty’s older and balder and long since faded to white and grey, but he still feels like he came out on top in the end, maybe.

“What are you thinking about?” Rust asks, one wet hand sliding down to rest at the dip of Marty’s back, words pressed somewhere against the ridge of his shoulder.

“Nothin’,” Marty says, and holds on to what he won after coming up out of the dark.

  
  


They eat a quick granola bar and yogurt breakfast sitting at the suite’s dining table with the laptop open, Marty sorting through emails while he stirs diced peaches into cold vanilla. There were two sets of complimentary bath robes hanging in the closet and Rust picked white satin over terrycloth, sitting in front of the picture window with his ledger open in front of him now, the silky material sashed loose around his waist.

It’s a clearly lady’s robe, short enough that it only hits Rust mid-thigh but Marty didn’t dare say a word on the matter. Rust had fingered the material and pulled it off the hanger without a second thought, shrugging it on before moving across the room to palm his notebook off the night table.

Funny thing is, maybe it doesn’t look half bad.

“What time are we checking out?” Rust asks, glancing at Marty over the laptop’s screen after he polishes off his breakfast. He’s got a fresh patch on this morning, hidden up under the robe where it’s tucked against his hip.

“Soon enough,” Marty says, shutting down the computer before rising to his feet. “Ain’t in any big hurry, though. We don’t got anywhere pressing to be until tomorrow morning.”

He picks up his duffel bag on the way to the bathroom and drops it on the floor by the sink, standing in front of the wide floor-length mirror that stretches across a good portion of the wall. The lights are turned down low and he shrugs off the terrycloth robe he’d been wearing, standing in front of a familiar reflection in nothing but a pair of boxer briefs.

They don’t have a mirror like this at the house and it’s almost strange, seeing himself this way—one long and uninterrupted image of a body he knows all too well, Martin Eric Hart standing there in the living flesh. He peers at his reflection and studies it from head-on, vaguely wondering if this is what the rest of the world sees when they happen to look.

Exercise and healthier eating has done Marty a favor or two and he’s slimmer than he was but his body doesn’t quite tone like it might’ve twenty years ago, softer in places that used to be threaded with muscle. His chest lacks the definition of a younger man, paler these days with a faint pink scar cutting diagonal across his collarbone. There’s another in the soft spot under his armpit, smaller and rounder like a lone white star, something that had fit a tube when he woke up from surgery after Carcosa.

His bad knee still looks as busted as it feels most days and Marty sighs low and heavy as he reaches up to touch the grey and white whiskers on his jaw, tipping his face forward to run a hand through the thinned hair left on his head.

Rust steps up to the sink behind him and Marty lets his arms slap against his sides, still staring at himself with the line of his shoulders slightly caved in. “Maybe we should stick around a little bit longer,” he says, trying for a laugh. “You could pick up some pretty young thing with perky tits, trade me in while I’ve still got some mileage left on me.”

The faucet turns off and Rust glances up into the mirror in front of him, toothbrush only brought halfway to his mouth. “What was that?” he says, even though they both know he heard Marty the first time.

“Don’t think it bears repeating,” Marty huffs, dropping his eyes away from his reflection to thumb along the waistband of his boxers. “Just feel fuckin’ old as shit, man, but that ain’t anything new.”

Rust sets his toothbrush down and Marty feels him before he can see him, and when he looks up the other man is standing behind him, the both of them caught together in the mirror’s surface.

“You throwin’ yourself some kind of pity party this morning?” Rust asks, words murmured soft and quiet. He isn’t meeting Marty’s eyes in their reflection, line of sight dropped somewhere lower under the cast of his lashes.

“No,” Marty says, clearing his throat. “I’m not.”

“Better not be,” Rust says, reaching out now to let three fingers skim down the line of Marty’s side, just enough to make him shiver. “I’d give or take the tits, but you know I like my dates with a little more experience these days.”

Marty makes a harsh noise in the back of his throat, trying not to fidget under Rust’s roaming hands. “Is that so?” he asks. “Washed-up and beat down too, I reckon.”

Rust hums and shakes his head, slowly stepping around in front of Marty so he blocks out their shared reflection. “Yeah,” he says, eyes briefly finding Marty’s before they drop down to settle on his mouth in a move that spans the bridge of twenty years between them. He reaches up and the pad of his thumb grazes the center of Marty’s bottom lip, resting there light as a feather.

“Did I ever tell you,” he says, swiping his thumb across the soft skin before leaning in to press a kiss there, “what I think about this?”

“N—no,” Marty stutters when Rust pulls away just as quick as he came, eyes already roving to find something new.

“Or this,” Rust says, touching the place where a hatchet had split through skin and bone, long fingers gentle and reverent on the scar carved into Marty’s chest. He bows over to press a chaste kiss there, too, hands come up to brace around Marty’s rib cage with the tip of his middle finger skimming that hidden scar under his arm, the one that holds a memory or two about failing breath and the lung that fell on the way out of Carcosa.

“No,” Marty repeats, fire-flushed now with his breath hitching as Rust’s mouth drags up the line of his throat. “You—you hadn’t told me.”

Rust’s hands slide down Marty’s sides until they’re pressed against the small of his back, thumbs finding the shallow dimples there without falter. “And these, too,” he says, turning his face now so the tip of his nose brushes Marty’s. “My favorite.”

“Christ,” Marty murmurs, pressing a hand against the swell of Rust’s backside to draw them close enough to slot together, and there’s warm satin soft against his skin but he wants it gone, needs Rust stripped naked with nothing in-between. He’s smiling now though, so much that his face is hurting, and he can’t quite look Rust in the eye when he feels a kiss press soft and sweet against one of his cheekbones, burning even hotter now than before.

Rust’s lips quirk while his hands sink lower and Marty lets out a stifled gasp when the other man gets both hands around his ass and squeezes.

“Almost forgot this,” Rust says, smiling outright when Marty swears low and dirty and starts steering them back towards the bedroom.

“You must’ve not wanted to check out yet,” he says, reaching down to paw at the sash around Rust’s waist. “Playing a game like that.”

They step on each other’s feet and stumble the whole way but Rust stops when the back of his knees hit the bed, standing there naked under the open robe. Marty’s eyes flick up to meet his as he reaches out to slowly ease one side off his shoulder, and with a nimble roll of his other arm Rust shrugs the robe off the rest of the way, letting it drop in a pool of white satin around his feet.

“Goddamn,” Marty says, watching Rust sink down onto the rumpled bedding, moving across the sheets until he’s sitting there with his body unfurled in a loose ribbon. “Like something straight out of a fucking movie.”

He pulls his boxers over his hips and kicks them off somewhere by the nightstand, already half-blind and single-minded with the kind of need that gets all his blood rushing south. Rust sits up with his legs still spread in an open invitation and Marty climbs between them, sliding close to find his mouth again.

“Love how fucking pink you get for me,” Rust murmurs, angling his head to kiss the narrow divot between Marty’s collarbones, still hot and flushing. “Precious.”

“You think you got me buttered up real good now, huh?” Marty says a little hoarsely, dropping to kneel like a lost sinner between Rust’s thighs. He moves in to press another kiss to his lips and when Rust reaches up to palm Marty’s sides he slumps forward and leans into him heavy.

“But you do,” Marty says, breaking in between kisses to murmur the words in a hot promise against Rust’s mouth. “God, Rust, I’d do any fucking thing so long as it was you who asked.”

“Jesus Marty,” Rust whispers as he presses back against him, palms dragging down to Marty’s hips with his thumbs dipping into the little ridges starting to cut there. Marty gives easy under his touch and where Rust pushes he ebbs and wanes, letting the other man’s hands run over him like lapping water.

Rust is still sitting spread out in the sheets and Marty gets his feet up underneath himself, swinging a leg around to straddle his lap and lick into the softness of his mouth. He doesn’t think twice about it until he feels the hard heat of Rust’s cock start to press against the inside of his thigh, hot enough already that it’s nearly searing him like a brand.

“Get ahold of that lube I know you fuckin’ packed,” Rust rasps against the underside of Marty’s jaw, long fingers spread wide at the small of his back. “Tell me how you want me.”

He starts shifting like he’s rearing to twist around and Marty stops moving, sitting there still straddled across Rust’s thighs with his own dick aching hard, the rosy head grazing the other man’s stomach if he breathes just right. Rust blinks at him while his fingers trace idle shapes on Marty’s skin, watching him with blue eyes burning earnest. And Marty can still feel all the places on his body where Rust’s mouth and fingers had staked out a trail of claims, knows the hollow ache in the pit of his stomach isn’t anything he can fill himself.

It doesn’t take him long to decide.

“Like this,” he says around the gravel lodged in his throat, listening to his own voice as if it’s coming from another body. “Just like this.”

“Marty,” Rust says, drawling out his name like a mouthful of warm honey. “Tell me what you want.”

“Oh shit,” Marty rasps through a laugh, almost broken, verging on lightheaded and already a little breathless. “Need it from you, Rust,” he says, and if he has to beg at this point the Lord knows he’d be willing. “God, I want you to fuck me.”

Rust’s cock jumps and scalds against his inner thigh at that and Marty doesn’t have the presence of mind left to be embarrassed about squirming around like a bitch in heat in the other man’s lap, only rises up on his good knee to kick one leg out straight behind Rust with the other bent around and tucked low against his back. He’s sitting in the spread of Rust’s thighs now with his dick caught between them, some shameful bone-deep desire long since broken and bled through him like a vial full of smoke.

“Fuck, Marty,” Rust growls out, getting his hands back around Marty and nosing against his neck, mouthing hot and wet against his throat. “Yeah, I got you.”

“How we gonna do this?” Marty says after he’s retrieved a familiar bottle out of his duffel bag, gasping as Rust sucks along the hinge of his jaw, and when the other man urges him up and back Marty goes willingly, letting two familiar hands guide and show him the way. “I can—oh fuck, I can turn over—”

“No,” Rust says, one word pitched soft and low. “On your back and spread your legs. I want you to watch me this time.”

Marty eases back into the sheets with his pulse pounding like the dying beat of a bird’s wings in his throat and Rust is up between his legs in an instant, already fire-eyed and focused, body poised in one long coil of gold-simmering heat. He runs his hands up Marty’s thighs and wraps them around his hips, thumbs swiping warm over the gentle jut of his hipbones while his eyes rove over the body splayed out in front of him.

“What’re you looking at?” Marty mutters, throat and chest flushed over balmy and warm. The words sound smaller beneath the weight of Rust’s gaze, like he’s shrunk in the presence of this man who only burns so hot and bright when the rest of the world isn’t looking.

“You,” Rust says, hands sliding easy down Marty’s thighs to fish around for the bottle dropped in the sheets.

“Alright Casanova,” Marty murmurs with a snort, though the light fan of his lashes dips low as he looks down and away. “Enough with the wooing, you already got me right where you want me.”

Rust pops the cap on the bottle and slicks up one hand, humming light in his chest. “Not yet I don’t,” he says, leaning over to press a kiss to the inside of one bent knee before he slides two fingers into Marty.

And it’s a full feeling to start but Rust takes his time, works Marty through it with as much care and attention as he can muster, not bothering with the third finger until the other man’s thighs are shaking and he’s begging for more.

“Fuck, Rust,” Marty gasps when the pad of Rust’s thumb circles the sensitive skin and teases along his taint. He’s aching hard enough that it’s set up like fire in his gut and he wants to feel him, needs him, all the rest of it be damned.  “Had enough of that, come on.”

When Rust pulls his fingers free and reaches for the lube bottle Marty can’t do anything but pant softly and watch him, remembering that the last time they were in this position he never got to see Rust move, never got to watch him slick up his palm to take himself in hand, the way his eyes flutter and his whole body shivers when he thumbs over the head of his own dark-flushed cock.

He lines up and Marty thinks he just bit through his own lip when the tip of Rust’s cock brushes the place where he’s stretched and aching. “Fuck,” he hisses, curling his fingers into the sheets. “You’d better come on already.”

Rust’s mouth curves into a smile as he hooks an arm under Marty’s thigh and lifts it up, pressing in close so it’s caught there in something like a stirrup between them. “Got to be patient,” he says, an echo of the words that had fallen off Marty’s tongue the night before. He takes his cock in hand again and pushes in just an inch before stopping, already wringing a choked and broken noise out of Marty.

“Oh, you motherfucker,” Marty says through a gasping laugh, trying to pull his leg free but Rust isn’t giving it up easily. “Don’t you dare try any of that, this ain’t the fucking circus—”

His words stutter and die in his throat when the other man hoists his leg up further, and it goes easy and without a complaint until Marty’s calf is wedged in the junction between Rust’s neck and shoulder. Once he’s held there in place Rust doesn’t waste any time, and still straddling the bed on his knees he fists himself and pushes the rest of the way into Marty.

“God damn it,” Marty rasps, clenching his eyes tight against the wet burn gathering at the corners. It hurts but it hurts in something he’s got to chase, and he nods to both himself and Rust for reassurance, letting out a shuddering breath through parted lips. “Just start moving, I’ll be alright in a second.”

Rust’s free hand splays wide over Marty’s lower stomach, a warm and solid weight there. “You sure you’re ready?”

“I’ve been ready,” Marty says, reaching down blind to brush the back of Rust’s hand with his fingers before gripping into the sheets. “Sitting here waiting on you to fuck me.”

There’s a throaty sound and Rust digs his fingers into Marty’s thigh, reeling back and fucking into him deep enough that he jolts them further back on the bed. Marty’s dick bounces back against his stomach and he groans low in his chest like a wounded animal, holding on tight as Rust thrusts into him again.

The pace they fall into is a fast one and Marty’s heel tries to press into Rust’s back but can’t find the leverage, left leg rendered useless and keeping him from pulling the man any closer than an arm’s breadth away. He swears a streak of blue-hot lighting when Rust’s free hand teases around his cock at the height of a hard thrust, dropping away after two short tugs that leave him aching even more than before.

“Feel so fucking good, Marty,” Rust rasps, a fine sheen of sweat gleaming on his face and chest now. His waves are still damp from the shower but have fallen loose against his forehead, dark and curling and wet. “So goddamn tight.”

He shifts on his knees and rails back in from a different angle and when he does Marty nearly cries, blinking his eyes back open as a jolt of pleasure rocks like fire through his pelvis. “Right there,” he chokes out, still trying and failing to wrap his legs around Rust. “Oh fuck me, right fucking _there— ”_

And Rust does, pivoting right into Marty’s sweet spot, hips stuttering in a rough jerk when the other man arcs his neck back and starts babbling through swear-riddled nonsense.

“Fuckin’ give it to me,” Marty moans low and dirty, yanking the sheet down the bed. His face is red and his eyes half-hooded, biting his own mouth swollen. “C’mon baby, oh God.”

“Talk to me, Marty,” Rust gasps, pulling all the way out before driving back in hard enough that their skin slaps. “Tell me.”

Rust has still got the other man’s thigh locked between them and Marty looks up at him from under his lashes, sweat-damp and somehow beautiful, scarred and bared and the only one, the only one he’d ever—

“Look at you,” Marty says, too far gone now to care about the break rattling in his voice. “So pretty for me, Rust.” He reaches out to try and pull him down with both hands, needs Rust closer, his mouth and his hands and the hammer of his heart. “Get down—oh fuck, get down here, I need you.”

And the way Rust moves it’s like he’d been waiting to be asked, dropping Marty’s leg to the side and bowing over him to find his mouth in a crash of a kiss, swallowing the other man’s whimper when he thrusts in to the hilt and grinds into his ass. He gasps when he feels both Marty’s legs wrap and lock around his waist, holding him in close and deep while their rhythm spins out slower and sweeter than it was before.

Marty’s words are only brushing the air in a rustle of whisper now, softer things that Rust could catch like curls of vapor between his fingers if he tried, gossamer and fine and only barely spoken. He can’t figure a time before when he’s ever heard Marty get like this, never seen him so lost in the glassy haze clouded up in his eyes, laying here flushed over with the kind of pink heat that feels like warm satin beneath Rust’s hands.

“Oh,” Marty’s panting, gasping breathless, fingers light but burning on Rust’s shoulders with his legs trembling around his waist. “Oh God, Rust. Oh fuck.”

He rolls his hips to meet Rust halfway and gets a heel dug down into the curve of his ass, trying to draw him in deeper every time they move and rock together. It’s hard to pull off like this but then it’s easy, all sweat-slick skin and building warmth that makes colors shine like spilled watercolor in front of Rust’s eyes, and despite their mismatched scars and edges they always manage to fit together just-so.

Rust doesn’t rush, isn’t chasing anything but the little noises burning through Marty like loose currents but he knows he’s getting close, can feel heat and tension twining up in a hot coil from the base of his spine.

“Rust,” Marty rasps, shaking now with his eyes clamped shut, pawing at Rust’s back like he can’t pull him near enough. “I—I’m almost—”

“Open your eyes,” Rust says, panting it close to Marty’s ear. “Look at me, Marty.”  

Their eyes finally lock and hold and it’s blue on blue fire to match the heat pooling in Marty’s stomach, Rust bowed close enough now that their foreheads are nearly touching while he pushes the both of them toward the end, all the signs caught like familiar omens in their shared breath and bodies.  
  
And so Rust watches when Marty finally falls over the edge with a wordless sound caught between a gasp and a whimper, clenching around him in a divine kind of heat that makes the room spiral out in shades of pink and amber. Rust fucks him the rest of the way there and then he’s dropping fast in something like a freefall, nowhere to go but deeper and further into Marty.

 

Daylight has long since begun pooling in the white sheets around them, cast in soft-rounded shapes that flicker across their skin like spilled gold. Rust turns his nose into the soft hinge behind Marty’s jaw and doesn’t try move from between his legs, knows he can’t, only lies there weak and wrecked in a tangle of limbs while their pulses thrum and flutter into something softer. He’s vaguely mindful of a hand cradling the back of his head, sliding down to cup around his neck and thumb through the shorter waves setting up in damp curls there.

Marty’s hand smoothes down his back, coarse fingertips trailing over knobs carved like totem notches along Rust’s spine. Their breathing lulls together and Rust feels it when Marty stiffens up just enough for the hitch of it to catch through his body, turning his face so each breath makes landfall across the flat of the younger man’s cheek.

“What?” Rust asks, one word pressed somewhere against the gentle blood-beat humming against his lips. He pulls his hand free from where it’d still been threaded with Marty’s, letting his fingers skim petal-soft down the inside of the other man’s forearm.

“Love you,” is what Marty says, murmured soft in an easy breath cut loose. “That’s all.”

And only three people have ever said those words to Rust in this life, not nearly enough to have rubbed the shine off, but they don’t make his chest tighten as much anymore when he hears them, don’t feel like corroded metal gone bitter and too-heavy in his mouth.

They feel like something else these days, and when he rises up on one elbow to find Marty’s lips he only hopes the other man can taste what he means.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The drive back home to Louisiana slants by in easygoing afternoon and soft rock on the radio, Marty’s murmured reminders to himself about stopping by the office and picking up fresh milk on their way into town. His cell rings ten miles past the state line and Marty glances at the screen but doesn’t pick up, letting the phone drop between his thighs and thud against the seat.

“Bobby Lutz,” he says, looking ahead out the windshield with a sniff. “Call him back when we get to the house.”

Rust picks up the thick manila folder sitting by his feet in the floorboard, idly fingering the rubber band around it but not looking at the pictures and papers tucked inside. “Hope you enjoyed our little vacation,” he says. “That fat check Lucinda Perry was promising you is as good as gone.”

“Shit,” Marty says, cutting his narrowed eyes over. “Well I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t gonna be the one to turn in Romeo and Juliet. Like shooting two lovebirds out of the fucking sky.”

He drums his fingers on the steering wheel for a moment, mouth twisted up into a wry line. “I mean, they weren’t doing anything wrong,” he says, going quiet for a few longer beats. “Think—well, think Lucinda must’ve had her kid pegged wrong from the start. Not seeing the whole picture.”

“Mmhmm,” Rust answers, glancing out the window at a passing semi. “Give you something to think about when you’re trying to balance the books next month and complaining about coming up too short.”

“Listen,” Marty says, trying not to laugh. “I ain’t too worried about it. I’m dead set on hiring these Munroe and Bellevue boys for security detail, think it’s gonna be a good move for the firm. And on top of that it won’t fucking kill us to cut a loss every once in a while, considering I think we still got a pretty good deal out of the bargain on this end.”

Rust’s thumb comes up to rest against his bottom lip as his eyes stray back over to Marty. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “Reckon we did.”

The sun is starting to slant down into his eyes through the windshield but Marty doesn’t reach up to fiddle with his visor, squinting down the long stretch of rolling highway ahead. “One time, years back, I told somebody about a man’s game charging a man’s price,” he says, hands briefly gone tight around the wheel before they fall slack. “I wasn’t—well.”

Marty draws in a breath and doesn’t have to look to know Rust is watching him. “It’s the same game we’re playing here,” he says, “but I’ll be damned if the rules don’t change.”

  
  
  


Dusk is slowly settling down on its haunches when Rust steps out of the office and lets the door ease shut behind him, loosely working a toothpick in one corner of his mouth. Marty is still on the phone with Jimmy Dawson inside, the sound of his laughter carrying out into the empty parking lot where it mixes in with the citrus-honey light tinting the summer evening.

Rust pulls the toothpick from his teeth and snaps it between two fingers before pitching it in the old cigarette urn sitting next to a quarter rack full of real estate magazines. He steps off the sidewalk and moves out from under the awning, standing on the warm asphalt with his and Marty’s names looming large on the side of the building above his head.

He catches movement in the sky and looks up, tipping his head back to watch a heavy handful of sleek birds dart and wing through the open air. They fly and dive like the Valkyries with their tapered wings and wide-fanned tails, sharp shapes of inky black until one turns midair and flashes iridescent indigo in the last dying reach of the sun.

They move with such reckless grace and wild abandon that Rust thinks they might not be real at first, fluttering around one another like mingling heartbeats he’s made up in his mind. He blinks once and again and they don’t disappear, twittering to one another now while they chase bugs through the darkening twilight.

He doesn’t hear the office door open but he doesn’t jump, either, when two strong arms circle low around his waist from behind.

“Look at that,” Marty says, pressing a kiss to the back of Rust’s neck before he rests his chin against his shoulder, eyes still watching the birds. “Never seen any out here before.”

Rust looks again too now that he knows they’re real, breathing out as he relaxes back against Marty. “You got everything wrapped up in there?” he asks, idly tracing one thumb across the knuckles on Marty’s left hand.

“Yep,” Marty says, the two of them with their eyes toward the sky as the flock of swallows clutches together and disappears over the building. “Reckon it’s time to take you on home.”

  
  
  


The moment the door swings open into the laundry room Rust hears a single meow strike up somewhere across the house, something like a high-pitched question. Another one sounds from somewhere closer a moment later and by the time they’ve taken two steps in the kitchen he’s got a little calico purring and winding around his legs, tip of her black tail curving around one knee like a shepherd’s crook.

“That cat pines for you like a dog,” Marty says, not doing much to hide the gap shining between his two front teeth when Rust bends over to hoist Ghost up in one arm with his bag still hanging in the other. “Damn hussy.”

He reaches out to take Rust’s duffel and then walks over to set both bags on the living room floor, dropping down into the recliner for a moment to start pulling the laces on his shoes. He stands when he’s done, pressing the heel of his hand into the small of his back until it pops with a wince.

“Fuck, I’m saddle sore from all that riding,” Marty murmurs, talking about the car more than anything. He doesn’t think much of it until Rust looks up from under his brows where he’d been poking through the mail Shelley left stacked on the countertop.

Marty’s neck flushes a hot pink but he doesn’t say a word until he’s disappeared down the hallway, fast and silent as a nighttime desert wind. “Gonna check in with Lucinda real quick,” his voice comes from the other side of the house. “Tell her we got back into town, set up a meeting for Monday.”

While Marty’s in the bathroom Rust strips his traveling clothes off until he’s down to his shorts and white undershirt, picking up Ghost from where she’d been perched on the bed before padding back out to the living room. He tugs a blanket loose off the back of the couch and then folds himself into the softness of it, sinking down in the cushions while the cat curls up and purrs in his lap.

Marty trails out a few minutes later, in a similar state with his rumpled underclothes and a content kind of tiredness hanging around his eyes. He clicks on the TV before sliding in next to Rust under a corner of the blanket, tucking warm up against his side with one arm draped behind his shoulders. Their feet line up together like errant soldiers on the ottoman, one of Rust’s wedged between both of Marty’s.

There’s some old movie they’ve already both seen running on the tube, the kind of thing you can watch without really seeing, letting Rust’s thoughts dip and linger elsewhere. He gently pushes his fingers through Ghost’s fur where she’s sprawled out across his legs, soft and silken as the heart lining of a rabbit’s nest. Marty’s free hand roams and pets something else, first two fingers mindlessly tracing along the split scar that broke the black feathers on Rust’s bird wing.

Rust looks down at his right arm, knows Marty isn’t touching the spot with any particular thought or feeling in mind, hand strayed to the scar like Rust’s own fingers would wander across a rough seam or loose thread.

He wonders if Marty knows he mended the black-inked bones back together, and thinks of purple feathers flashing like a hint of borealis come to find him in the southern sky.  
  


* * *  
  


Bobby Lutz is back on the phone just after lunch the next day, laughing down the line and cracking jokes on some old bullpen story that’s got Marty holding himself up on the kitchen counter and mopping around his eyes.

“Christ, his fuckin’ face that morning—three sheets to the wind and all Quesada can do is holler _Who in the living name of all holy fuck pissed in my fucking coffee?_ Tell you what, I nearly pissed myself on that one, you and Rodriguez over there trying to keep shit straight. Never seen Steve so fucked up in my whole life.”

He coughs out another laugh before taking a sip of iced tea, listening to Bobby prattle on about something for a moment. “Yeah,” he says, glancing at the kitchen table where Rust is wiping crumbs from a turkey sandwich off his fingers. “Yeah, I can probably make it out there. We just got in from a client meeting about a half-hour ago but I ain’t got too much going on the rest of the day. Hold—hold on a second.”

Marty presses the phone against his chest and waits until Rust looks up to meet his eyes. “Bobby’s got something in the garage he wants me to take a look at, says we’re free to drive out this afternoon. You got anything running or you wanna tag along?”

Rust folds up his napkin full of crumbs and gives a short shake of his head as he walks to the trash. “You go on ahead,” he says, lightly touching Marty’s elbow as he pads out of the kitchen. “Got a few things I want to get done around here but tell Bobby I’ll make it another time.”

The Cadillac pulls out of the driveway twenty minutes later and Rust stands from the sofa with his ledger under one arm and walks into the office, one finger ghosting over the dusty spines on a shared bookshelf until he finds what he was looking for. It’s a small book bound in green imitation leather the color of summer leaves, embossed with gold lettering and a single simple songbird on the front.

Audrey and Macie gave it to him something like sixteen years ago, maybe around ’96 or ’97, handed off after Christmas Eve dinner wrapped in red with a white ribbon. They’d seen some of the sketches in his ledger that weren’t dead women and children and Rorschach blots of brain matter and blood—the stray cat with a torn ear that liked to loiter around the back stoop of his apartment, a pair of hands with a recognizable ring obscured, the view from the door of a cabin taken from memory and maybe the errant bird or two, scratched into the margins like they could take flight right off the page.

It’d been an odd sort of gift at the time, something he accepted from the hands of two children who barely knew him with a small smile and few murmured words of thanks. He supposed Maggie had taken them to pick it out, tried to steer them toward something like a new coffee thermos or department store gift card only to sigh and relent at the very end.

Rust flips through the index and then back to what he was looking for, eyes scanning over the glossy page before he sits down at Marty’s desk to open his notebook. He picks up a pencil and throws a few smooth lines across the page, thinking of rounded blades cutting across the light of the sun.

A little while later he makes sure the door is locked behind him and then steps down the front walk to his truck, swinging up behind the wheel with a piece of paper folded into the breast pocket of his open flannel.

  
  
  


Marty makes it back home just after dinnertime, looking a little sunburnt and wind-chafed but otherwise in high spirits. They’ve got a meeting set up with Lucinda Perry in the morning and Rust sits at the bar gathering notes together while Marty putters around the kitchen in his cargo shorts and an old USL t-shirt, boiling rice and poking holes in a pair of sweet potatoes with a steak knife.

“What’d you get done around here today?” he asks Rust, throwing a dishtowel over one shoulder while he digs around for something in the fridge.

Rust doesn’t look up from his notes, carefully copying something from a legal pad into his ledger. “Not a whole lot,” he says, which is the truth. “Did some reading, looked some into getting back up to Alaska. If you’re wantin’ to fly our best bet is probably mid-autumn sometime.”

“Yeah?” Marty says, looking up so a soft smile spreads across his face, a stick of margarine brandished in one hand. “You changed your mind about the flying?”

Rust looks up and then back down to scrawl something else. “Different sort of trip,” he says, sniffing a little. “Don’t have to take the same route every time.”

“Nope,” Marty says from where he’s lifting the lid on the rice pot now, stirring a dash more salt into the water. “Sure don’t.”

They sit down to baked chicken and sweet potatoes at the kitchen table, wordlessly passing the butter dish back and forth while the radio plays low on the counter. Rust never much cared for sweet potatoes in any past life but he cleans his plate and eats a few more bites beyond that, trying a spoonful Marty decided to drizzle with a drop of honey. And it’s nothing fancy or world class but it fills him up even more than the three-course meal they’d sat through at the Beau Rivage, leaving a warm haze of something sweet and crisp lingering around long after they’ve cleaned up the kitchen.

By the time ten o’clock rolls around Marty’s already showered and tucked into bed, sitting back against the headboard with his reading glasses low on his nose and an open book in his lap. Ghost is flat on her back between his sheet-draped knees, dead to the world with all four paws in the air, and this is the scene Rust walks in on when he comes down the hall from the shower with a towel wrapped around his waist.

Only the bedside lamp is burning and Marty doesn’t look up when the other man walks in, only lets his eyes skim over the last few words before licking one thumb to turn the page. He keeps reading while Rust moves around the room, dropping his towel and fishing a pair of boxers out of the dresser, stowing his boots in the closet and reaching down to gently scratch around Ghost’s ears when she gets up to pad to the end of the bed.

It isn’t until he’s standing at his side of the bed, pulling the sheet down and arranging the pillows that Marty glances up over the rims of his glasses. He looks once and then does a double-take when he sees the dark spot staining Rust’s skin, mouth falling open as he reaches up to pull the frames off his face.

“Jesus Christ, that better not be a bruise. I know we had a good time the other night but don’t tell me I’m the one who put that—”

Marty’s voice cuts off short once he’s holding his glasses in hand, book fallen slack and flat in his lap. “What’s that?” he asks, tone gone careful, looking up at Rust’s face and then back down at his side. “You got another one?”

Rust doesn’t say anything as Marty shifts in bed, setting his book aside and pushing the sheet back so he can scoot to the other side of the mattress when the other man settles down on the edge there.  
  
He reaches out and braces his hand around Rust’s ribcage to get a better look at the winged creature taking flight down his right side, still a little swollen at the edges but beautiful and real as anything cut from the sky. “Well shit,” Marty says, laughing a little winded. “You turning into Birdman or something?”

Rust looks at him leveled steady, eyes cast sleepy-soft beneath his lashes. “You know what kind of bird that is?” he asks, ribs shifting easy under his skin as he breathes in and out.  
  
Marty lightly runs his thumb over the black and indigo-purple ink, tracing around the edge of a wing and the sharply fanned tail. “You got me,” he sighs with a shake of his head, even though he won’t take his eyes off it. “You’re the one who’s probably sat through damn near every episode of National Geographic in creation.”

"It’s a martin," Rust says softly, hearing Marty’s breath catch light in his chest when he does. "A purple martin."

There’s a long moment of silence where neither man moves and then Marty’s palm is pressing over the bird, covering the feathers with his hand. He looks up at Rust and then away, line of his throat working faster than before. When he turns back around his eyes are wet, quickly hiding them when he bows his head against Rust’s shoulder and draws in a breath that sounds like autumn leaves around the edges.

“Oh, Rust,” he says, just a little bit broken. “Rust—Jesus.”

Rust drops his eyes to the top of Marty’s head and then leans over so his lips land somewhere crooked against his temple. He lets his mouth rest there for a moment, waiting until Marty’s breath shifts back into something normal, and then smiles. “What if I said you have to get one for me now?”

“Yeah,” Marty says, laughing a little through a wet sniffle as he sits back up to scrub around his eyes. “Like ‘my favorite asshole’ right over my heart, how about that?”

“Sounds befitting,” Rust says, letting out a surprised little noise when Marty reaches up and pulls him back onto the bed.

“It would, you prick,” Marty snorts without any real heat, getting his arms around Rust and pulling him close so they’re lying in a diagonal heap across the top of the bed. “Jesus H. Christ.”

He touches his forehead against Rust’s and smiles, can’t help the grin spreading like a sunrise across his face. “Said it once and I’ll say it again,” he murmurs, moving around to press a kiss to the corner of Rust’s mouth. “You’re gonna kill me yet.”

“Do you like it?” Rust asks, unsure of why he’d even bother to ask.

“Are you kidding me?” Marty says, pressing another pair of kisses to Rust’s mouth and then one below his eye, hand gone back down to the martin like a moth drawn to the flame. He grins again and then this time Rust mirrors it, letting his eyes slip shut while he smiles, feeling the other man’s next few words rumble through him.

“I love it,” Marty says.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Better late than never, right? And back with 32K of Domestic Redneck Candyland to boot. A story within a story, if you will. Consider me dead and gone.
> 
> I'm a bit lost for words myself in the face of having just finished writing this monster, so before I forget:
> 
> Thank you to the lovely Gloria for supplying all the Spanish translations and planting the collapsed lung idea in my head; thank you to Leen for inspiring too many thrifting feels about blue blazers and a few other things. Thank you to Allie for keeping my ass alive while this was getting written and thank you to everybody else for helping make this story a beautiful sort of collaborative experience that enriches my life every single day.
> 
> Please feel free to drop me a line or two if you enjoyed! I love hearing from you guys, it makes all this the more enjoyable and worthwhile. Your words are always so appreciated. <3


	32. first steps

Fifteen minutes inside the Lafayette city limits Audrey glances over into the passenger seat and sees her mother’s hands resting in her lap, palms pressed flat against the thighs of her jeans. Pale and finely veined with round nails cut short, no polish to speak of, just her wedding rings on the third finger of her left hand.

They’ve always looked like soft white marble carved to mimic real life, just as hard and unyielding but never quite cold. A nurse’s hands, maybe, even though Maggie doesn’t wear scrubs to work anymore and hasn’t in nearly five years.

Audrey looks at the car ahead of them and then back again, blonde hair shifting around her shoulders while the AC blows through it like wind through golden wheat. “Mom,” she says. “You’re bleeding.”

Maggie blinks and looks down at her hands, watching as the bead of dark red wells and grows at the side of her bitten thumbnail. She brings it up to her mouth and holds it there, squinting out the windshield with faint lines pulling between her eyes.

“How much further is it?” she asks, dropping the stinging thumb away from her mouth to tuck it inside her fist. “I’ve never driven much past the hospital.”

Lilah lets out a shrill little squeal from the back seat that tapers off into a gurgle, and when Maggie turns around she’s looking out the window with her head tipped back, tiny hands idly working while she watches a passing semi-truck.

“Dad’s place is about twenty minutes from here,” Audrey says, tapping her maroon-lacquered nails on the steering wheel as they slow for a light. She looks straight ahead to watch for green and Maggie sees her oldest daughter in profile, no makeup save for a little mascara to darken her lashes, normally as fine and blonde as corn silk.

That was something she inherited from her father.

Audrey has Marty’s eyes and nose and bulldog-set determination, too, and sometimes Maggie looks at her and can’t see a glimmer of her own self reflected back. But she’s there, alright—hidden in the pretty bow of Audrey’s top lip and the shape of her ears, her brittle-thin wrists and the high arches of her feet.

Sometimes Maggie wonders how much of herself and Marty will show up in Lilah, if she’ll look at her granddaughter one day and see an echo of herself at all. Not that she’s ever been too concerned with the longevity of her own gene pool or anybody else’s, but it’s always been interesting, maybe, looking at a child and finding a familiar face looking back.

The car turns down a belt of highway flanked by strip malls and fast food restaurants and Maggie looks down at the raw-bitten skin on her thumb, blinking out of the past when Audrey’s voice cuts through the cabin.

“You’ve never been to their house before, have you?” she asks, and Maggie feels the line of her throat work tight as Marty’s eyes flick over to glance at her from the driver seat. _Their house._

“No,” she says, reaching up to finger the golden feather clasped around her neck, almost halfway expecting to find a tiny sterling heart there instead. “This’ll be the first.”

Maggie presses the charm into the pad of her thumb and prays Rust isn’t the one to answer the door.  
  


* * *  
  


The Ford pickup is parked in the driveway next to Marty’s black Cadillac, and Maggie knew it would be there but the sight of the faded red paint still makes seven years drop like deadweight into the cyclone whirlpool of her thoughts.

Audrey pulls into the drive and the second thing she sees are the patches of Louisiana iris, scattered through the porch-front flowerbeds in a mixed bouquet of gold and indigo and periwinkle blue. Bursts of orange and gingery marigold poke up around the mailbox in carefully manicured plots and funny, maybe, how the only color Maggie remembers growing from her yard in a past life was one unending and familiar shade of green.

There’s a cat sitting under the flowering crepe myrtle tree at the far corner of the house, settled back on her haunches in the pink-dusted grass. Maggie unbuckles her seatbelt and watches it through the window, sitting silent vigil with a pale blue collar buckled around her throat.

“Here we are,” Audrey breathes out, pulling the keys from the ignition before sliding from her seat into the driveway. “Do you wanna get the baby while I start unloading some of this stuff for Dad?”

Maggie slips from the car and hooks her pocketbook in the crook of an elbow, eyes straying back over to the calico sentry sitting under the crepe myrtle while she undoes the straps on Lilah’s car seat and lifts her out into the sunlight.

“Whose cat is that?” she asks, tossing the question across one shoulder to her daughter while the baby gets a handful of her blouse. “Over there in the yard.”

The sole of a boot scuffs on the concrete and Maggie turns in time to see Rust stepping off the porch with more dull silver shining in his hair than she remembers, squinting through the sun with his standard soft-edged scowl thrown into place.

“That’d be Ghost,” Rust says, not bothering to turn and glance at the cat. “She’s ours.”

He offers Maggie a nod as he walks up, reaching out to gently squeeze Lilah’s socked foot before breezing past to start helping Audrey unload the back of the car. Rust doesn’t lean in to hug her but he lets his hand briefly settle at the middle of her back while she pulls something out of the trunk, then accepts the kiss she presses feather-light to his cheekbone without a slip or waver in his expression.

Audrey’s loading up his arms with a pair of overnight bags when the front door yawns open again and a familiar voice rings out across the afternoon.

“There’s my little lamb,” Marty calls from the porch, thudding down the wooden steps with a grin already splitting his face in two. He strides right over to where Maggie’s still standing in the drive and leans in to kiss Lilah on one cheek, earning a tiny smile and babble for his efforts when his whiskers tickle her face.

“You ready to run wild this weekend with Grampa and Poppy?” Marty asks, palming the same little foot Rust had touched a few moments before. “Chase jackrabbits and howl at the moon.”

He catches Maggie’s eye and there’s a glint of the old charm she knows like the back of her hand, sparkling and warm blue and just the same as it always was.

“Good to see you, Mags,” Marty murmurs, and the way he says it she knows he means it, one warm hand come up to touch her elbow in a soft gesture come and gone. He moves around her to join Rust and Audrey at the back of the car, hefting one of the bags off Rust’s shoulder before moving in to press a lopsided kiss his daughter’s temple. “And my big little lamb, too—hey darlin’.”

“Hey Dad,” Audrey says with a smile, leaning into him for a moment. “You two been doing alright?”

“Yeah, we’ve been holding up fine,” Marty says, winking a little from somewhere behind Rust’s shoulder. “Think somebody might’ve missed y’all—never seen him move so fast in my whole life.”

Rust sniffs and turns but doesn’t deny it, already making headway for the front door with everybody else slowly tagging along behind. “Knew they were gonna need help unloading,” he says, letting out a low whistle from near the porch steps.

Ghost’s head perks up at the sound and Maggie watches as the cat starts off at a slow trot through the grass, black tail held high as she weaves between the porch and tall bushels of purple iris. Marty follows in Rust’s wake only two or three steps behind and when he holds up a broad hand and murmurs _watch your step, babe_ in a voice cut clean from memory, Maggie nearly bites the tip of her tongue to keep some kind of answer from rolling out of her mouth as easy as a polished stone.

She holds Lilah tighter and presses her lips into a thin smile. Audrey is anchored like a familiar moon at her shoulder, the both of them waiting while Rust pulls the front door open and disappears inside.

“After you,” Marty says, keeping the door wedged open with the toe of his shoe, and Maggie wonders if he senses the surrealism hanging around the edges of this moment, too—if on last Christmas or even the day he walked into her house to tell her he and Rust might not be coming back from that rotted place in the woods, he felt the prodding fingers of what she’s feeling now.

She steps over the threshold into the foyer and breathes in the smell of it—not the usual throw of too many men in a small place like she might’ve imagined, thinking back to the pungent musk of a boys’ locker room she might’ve hidden in once or twice back in high school. It smells clean but not overly perfumed at all, just another house on the block with cotton laundry soap, and Maggie slowly realizes the root of that uncanny feeling unfurling like a climbing vine in the hollow of her stomach, winding through her ribcage while she stands in a living room that belongs to two men who bent and repaved the course of her life.

She’s an outsider here, she knows. A foreign body drawn into the cell, a passing satellite pulled into the orbit of something bigger. Not bigger than her, because she’s always been able to hold her own and hold it well—but she can still feel the electric heat of it, humming here in the heart of the place.

Like anything that came between them now would only burn to ashes in the crossfire.

“Get you anything?” Rust asks from the kitchen, dropping a look over one shoulder from beneath lowered lashes. He moves differently on his feet here than Maggie ever remembers, more sure-footed and grounded but still just as graceful, a wizened old mountain cat in place of the yearling buck that wandered into her kitchen with a bouquet of cheap flowers twenty years ago.

“No,” Maggie says, gently untangling Lilah’s hand from the gold chain of her necklace. “Thank you, though.”

And when Rust turns and walks toward her she doesn’t move, only blinks when the baby coos and leans out of her arms to blabber something with all ten fingers outstretched for the familiar man.

“She wants you, Rust,” Audrey says from the couch, sitting back and crossing her legs. A smirk pulls around her mouth as she throws both eyes over to Maggie. “Hand her over to Poppy, Gigi.”

Marty stops squinting at baby food labels in the kitchen and looks up, a wicked sort of smile spreading across his face. _“_ _Gigi_ _,_ huh?” he says, pressing the tip of his tongue into one canine tooth. “I should’ve known you weren’t gonna be one to go by grandma.”

Maggie clears her throat as faint pink colors her cheeks but Rust only holds his hands up and smiles softly, close enough now that she can note how he doesn’t throw off the ever-present slap of cigarette smoke anymore—just something fresh and warm, like clean water and good soap.

“Well come on, then,” he says in a low voice, skimming Maggie’s fingers when he takes Lilah and hitches her up on his chest. “Hey there, Miss Lilah.”

The baby hums out something that sounds conversational as Rust slowly carries her into the kitchen, the two of them stepping through a wedge of sunlight slanting through the window across the tile. Maggie eases down next to Audrey on the sofa and watches Rust reach into the freshly-rinsed bag next to the sink, picking up a green grape between two fingers.

He bites it in half and then offers the other piece to Lilah without a word, waiting until her lips part before popping it into her mouth. She chews for a few seconds and then her tiny face pinches up at the sour-sweet, and Maggie doesn’t know if she’s ever seen Rust smile the way he does when he looks at that little girl.

“Too sour still?” he asks like he’s talking with anybody else, reaching into a glass bowl next to the grapes to pick up a ripened blueberry instead. “Try this one.”

The blueberry disappears with more success and Lilah kicks her feet for another one, and by the time she’s eaten three more she’s got a stream of purple juice running down her chin, something Marty moves in to wipe away with a dishtowel he’d had draped over one shoulder.

“Poppy’s fixin’ to spoil your lunch,” he murmurs, cleaning Lilah up before leaning in closer to kiss her cheek again. “Your mama’s gonna have him whipped before she even gets out the door.”

“Naw,” Rust murmurs, reaching up to adjust the little bloomer ruffles on the baby’s jumper so they aren’t crooked around her legs. “We know Grampa wouldn’t let her.”

Marty doesn’t do anything but laugh a little breathless and Maggie knows in an instant that the truth wrapped in that sound goes deeper than anyone or anything else in this room. It startles her at first brush but then she isn’t surprised, maybe, thinking about how the Marty she used to know would back another man before he looked into the eyes of a searching woman.

But then again, Rust isn’t any other man. He never was.

Part of her has always known that, maybe—knew it long before she ever even saw it. Somewhere lying dormant in the back of her mind for seventeen years like an unfinished tapestry that just needed one more stitch to pull and ravel together.

So when Marty leans forward and kisses Rust with Lilah carefully pressed between them, Maggie doesn’t look away. She feels the skin on her stomach pull tight and her mouth go dry but she doesn’t look at her daughter and she doesn’t close her eyes, because this is the reality she walked into, the thread she might’ve seen first unwound that night Rust Cohle sat down at her kitchen table wearing death’s mask.

She wonders if they even remember she’s sitting in their living room right now, a guest in this house that seamed together when two halves of broken men met somewhere in the middle. She wonders, too, if they know they make one person—if Marty only found out who he was because that was the kind of knowledge Rust never lacked.

When she asks to use the restroom, Marty only smiles and points her down the carpeted hall.

Maggie is surprised, just a little, when it’s tidily decorated and clean. She’d never say as much out loud but she also doesn’t hold any fond memories of picking Marty’s wet towels up off the bathroom floor or scrubbing toothpaste globs full of gold whiskers out of the sink. Rust would be the exact opposite of that, though, and she thinks about his strange sense of Spartan utilitarianism while she considers pinching off a piece of toilet paper to lift the seat on the commode and then decides otherwise.

She’s got no reason to feel dirty or squeamish here, as if these two men became strangers to her through lengthened time and space. Not after everything else.

When Maggie gets up to wash her hands their toothbrushes are necked together like two lovers in a jelly glass by the sink, and for some reason she can’t take her eyes off the blue and yellow plastic. The water turns off and she dries her hands but her gaze goes right back to them, and when wet heat starts prickling behind her eyes she looks up at herself in the mirror, willing the burn to not spill over and make her mascara run.

She’s got no goddamn reason to cry, at least not for herself. For them, maybe—but she surely didn’t miss out on anything when she left Martin Hart behind, save for a broken marriage and some shards of trust to match. She tells herself that more often than she cares to think, like a yearly mantra repeated in good faith.

And so the two tears she angrily wipes away aren’t for herself. One apiece for each man, for finally finding what they couldn’t find anywhere else. For finally getting a grip on what they’d needed with the only other person they’d ever really deserved.

Maggie flips the light off with more force than needed and unbolts the lock, and across the hall is the open door to the master bedroom. She doesn’t move from the bathroom tile but she can see the foot of the made bed, done up in a soft blue blanket that looks like it’d feel like shaved velvet if she touched it. It’s a queen most likely, and she knows that if she stepped inside and opened the adjacent closet she’d find more than just Marty’s clothes hanging there.

That’s a given of course, but the vision that fills Maggie’s head comes quick and without any warning while she stands with the doorknob still held in hand. A potpourri mixture of sensation pulled from memories both real and fabricated: Marty’s broad hands burning around her hips, his mouth teasing open the satin wetness of her, the way he’d always kiss her hairline and trace her wrists on the nights when they’d make love.

And then a hard heat at her back, one black-tattooed forearm braced and tightened like a vice under her breasts. The thick smell of smoke and booze and shame and maybe there are other false trapdoor memories, too, where Rust found her face with his heavy-lidded eyes and touched her lips like scripture while she gasped his name, holding her body to him while he sunk in deep and sweet enough that she could cry.

Part of Maggie knows how they’d look together, then, so tangibly real she can almost see it in front of her eyes. A blurred haze of flushed pink and pale gold skin, the thickness of Marty’s heavier hips and softer stomach pressing a more angular body down into the bed. Rust’s long legs crossed at the ankle to pull the other man closer and she’s never seen his bare feet in her life but she nearly feels the way his toes would cramp and curl when he came.

The breath Maggie lets out into the empty hallway only rattles the faintest bit at the edges. She checks her eye makeup in the mirror again and then straightens her necklace so the clasp is back at the nape of her neck, twisting the gold feather around so it rests in the dip of her throat.

She walks back down the hall and when two pairs of blue eyes swivel to find her, she smiles.  
  
  


 

“So what’s Lilah and Gigi’s normal weekend routine like, huh?” Marty asks from where he’s settled on the floor, looking up at Maggie from under raised brows. She lets her eyes quickly trace the contours of his face before she answers, still mulling over the neatly trimmed beard she’d never seen him wear in any previous life.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Maggie says, sliding her hands down over her thighs with a small sniff. “Shopping, pedicures, margarita lunch dates with the girls—nothing too special.”

“Is that so?” Marty murmurs, holding Lilah up so she can stand balanced on his knees. “Probably won’t have any interest in the kiddie pool we picked up, then.”

Audrey looks up from her phone and presses it into Rust’s hand so he can keep flipping through progress photos of her latest gallery pieces, wedged in close to her side on the couch. “I was wondering what that was,” she says, nodding toward the blue plastic visible through the sliding glass door. “God, I haven’t seen one of those in a million years.”

“Fill it up tonight so it’ll start warming up in the morning,” Marty says, trying to coax Lilah into taking a step across the carpet. She’ll balance if she holds onto his fingers but can’t take more than one or two steps without stumbling, yammering on while she watches her own feet.

“You pack her suit?” Rust asks quietly, passing Audrey’s phone over. He sits back and stretches an arm behind her across the couch, thumb nearly brushing Maggie’s shoulder on Audrey’s other side.

“Yeah,” Audrey says, laughing a little. “She’s only got the one and Dad said to bring it—so it’s in there with her clothes.” She turns to look at Rust again though, one hand touching down light on his forearm. “You guys gotta be sure to use her hat and some sunblock if you keep her out in the sun, though. If she takes after any of us I know she’ll burn to a crisp.”

“Just like her Grampa,” Marty says, blowing a raspberry on Lilah’s cheek that makes her squirm and giggle. “Rust’ll be after the both of us with the damn sunblock all weekend.”

“Naw, I’d let your ass burn,” Rust says to Marty, though Maggie feels the couch shift as he climbs to his feet and walks around the coffee table. His knees fold and creak underneath him until he’s sitting cross-legged on the carpet, just a handful of feet away from where Marty’s still keeping the baby held upright.

Lilah gets an eyeful and starts leaning toward Rust without moving her feet, straining a little against Marty’s hands so she can drop down to the floor and crawl.

“See if she’ll take a step this way,” Rust murmurs, holding his hands up as if to catch her.

“She ain’t gonna walk for you,” Marty snorts, though he rises up on his knees some to steady behind her. “Took Audrey six more months than this before she was walking on her own—there’s no way.”

“Let me get the camera out just in case,” Audrey murmurs, hurrying to boot her phone back up. “Orren’ll kill me if she walks and he doesn’t get to see it.”

“Come on, Miss Lilah,” Rust says, voice gone softer than before. “You can do it.”

Lilah is still holding tight onto Marty’s hands but takes one shaky step and then another, pulling her grandfather along behind her. One more foot forward and just when Marty tries to let go she stumbles and topples, falling right into Rust’s waiting hands.

“Almost got it,” Rust hums, bending over to press a kiss to the top of her head. Lilah looks up at him and grins with her tiny pearl teeth and Maggie wants to reach down and pinch the inside of her own arm where it’ll hurt the most, anything to get her to wake up and step out of this unraveling dream.

Rust couldn’t hardly look Audrey and Macie in the eye twenty years ago, would only focus on the front of their little blouses or blink at them from the corner of his vision like mirages rippling across the kitchen table. She knew that for what it was when he told her about his baby girl passing on, but here and now she can barely believe what she’s seeing no matter where she looks—the curtains hanging above the windows, the little cat rubbing along her shins under the coffee table. A smile on Rustin Cohle’s face and two lost souls brought back into the light of something she never knew they could’ve wanted or needed.

But then again, maybe what they needed had never really been that much of a mystery.  
                                 
Lilah doesn’t try to get back up from Rust’s lap, only plops down between his legs and presses her little face against his stomach. Her hands come up to lightly fist in his shirt and he rubs a palm down her back, tipping his head to one side as he pushes a honey curl behind the shell of her ear.

“Maybe it’s nap time,” he says, cupping the back of her head with his hand, and Maggie’s held that hand in her own before—strong but still somehow uncertain, scarred deep with ugly and wretched things, dipped into the kind of darkness she’d never be able to truly know.

And yet they’re reverent here, nurturing and gentle. Carefully cradling a small and breakable life.

Rust always did have beautiful hands.

Maggie’s standing up off the couch before the impulse to do so even fully registers in her head.

“I—I think we forgot something in the car,” she says, clutching her purse to one side as she moves for the front door like she’s swimming through the air turned to raw cotton. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Three pairs of eyes watch her go without a word and she doesn’t let out another breath until the heels of her flats have clicked down the porch steps and she’s got sun-warmed concrete underfoot, standing in the middle of the driveway between a black Cadillac and red Ford.

Maggie doesn’t cry but she tells herself it’d be easier if she did—it’d make more fucking sense, letting the sting of some indistinct hurt well behind her eyes. But now she’s gone and made a spectacle of herself and she doesn’t smoke but she needs a cigarette like her next breath, craving the smooth burn of nicotine all the way down to the roots of her teeth.

She’s leaning back against the trunk of Audrey’s car and staring up into the gently swaying oak trees lining the street when she hears the familiar scuff of a boot sole on the pavement, and that’s all the warning Rust gives before he walks up alongside her and drops the tailgate on his truck.

He doesn’t say a word for a few long moments, only slides back to sit on the scuffed metal, the bed of the old Ford bowing some under his weight. One hand reaches up on instinct for a cigarette carton that isn’t in his shirt pocket and Maggie sees it freeze and drop when he remembers halfway.

“Fuck,” Rust says, one syllable cut low on a sigh. “Still forget sometimes.”

“Can’t have a conversation without a cigarette in your hand?” Maggie says, and it wasn’t meant to sound so unkind but she digs her nails into the heel of her hand when it comes out verging close on a sneer. She shakes her head and tries again, trying to will something softer into her voice when Rust’s eyes slant over to find her face. “Guess Marty finally got you on the wagon for good.”

“Somethin’ like that,” Rust says, moving his left hand so there’s more room on the tailgate next to him, plain gold band still there and catching the light on his third finger. “But I didn’t come out here to talk about me.”

Maggie looks at the vacant spot but doesn’t move. “What’re Marty and Audrey doing?”

“Fussing with the playpen and trying to get the baby settled,” Rust says, turning to squint out across the neighborhood so she sees him in profile—just the same as he always was, handsome brow only creased a little more with weather and age, most of the wave in his greying hair cut short for the summer. He braces his hands by his thighs and hunches his shoulders some, leaning forward while the old metal creaks underneath him.

“We both know you didn’t forget anything out here, Maggie,” he says, gaze dropping to the tops of her feet. A few moments slip by and then his eyes flicker up, hot where they rest on the side of her face. “You alright?”

There’s a lawnmower humming in the distance and some songbird making a racket in the treetops, cries mixing in with the breathless sound of Maggie’s quiet laugh. She sits down on the edge of the tailgate but doesn’t let her feet lift off the ground, crossing her legs at the ankle while her hands touch down on the warm metal.

“I’m fine,” she says, and to anybody else it’d almost sound convincing, but maybe talking to Rust was always like hearing her thoughts echo off a canyon wall.

“Thing about the past,” he says in that soft drawl, “is that it’ll always be there in the mirror over your shoulder. You can keep catching glances of your old reflections, and shit knows I’ve done my fair share of navel-gazing, but it ain’t gonna do you any good in going ahead. That’s something I’ve had to learn along the way.”

“I don’t make a habit of wallowing around in the past or what could’ve been,” Maggie says, sniffing some. “There’s nothing there worth dwelling over.”

Rust laughs then, a low and rasping sound foreign enough to make her arms prickle. “Maybe you and Marty still have more in common than you think.”

She doesn’t quite know what he means but Maggie only smiles and shakes her head, sliding back onto the tailgate next to Rust so her feet swing above the ground. “I didn’t come out here to talk about me either, you know,” she says, and he looks up at her with those sleepy blue eyes, brows raised just a hair.

“No?” Rust says.

“No,” Maggie repeats, and she’s at a loss for the words she really wants to say so she pulls the next formed thought from her mind instead. “She’s really taken with you—Lilah.”

Rust rolls one shoulder while the corner of his mouth twitches up, though his eyes fall back to the ground. “Naw, she’s a good baby. Probably falls right in love with everybody she meets.”

“I don’t know about that,” Maggie says. “Every time she comes to stay with us it takes her about two hours before she’ll even look sideways at Ted. He always has to win her back over.”

“Don’t really mean nothing, her being so young and all,” Rust says. “Probably just got lucky—other kids would just as soon start bawling the minute I walked into a room.”

Maggie turns to look at him then, watching his lashes dip low. “Do you really think those kinds of things are left up to chance?” she says, softer than she might’ve intended for him. “That child’s seen you all of ten times in her life and she loves you already. Don’t…squander that, Rust, or try to undermine it for what it is.”

“I never meant to,” he says quietly, still not meeting the older woman’s eye. “She—she means a lot. To me, you know.”

Maggie drops her hand to the tailgate between them and when their elbows brush together Rust doesn’t flinch or pull his arm away. “And I don’t give a damn that she’s not your own flesh and blood,” she adds. “None of the rest of us cares a thing about it, least of all Marty.”

“Yeah,” Rust says, finally lifting his head. “I suppose not.”

The front door creaks open again and this time the coming body announces himself before he can even get off the porch. “What the hell are y’all doing out here, panning for gold?” Marty calls, carefully taking the steps one at a time with Lilah hitched up on his hip. “Miss Lilah was wantin’ to know where her Gigi’d gotten off to.”

He walks over to them through the grass with Audrey in tow, purse slung over one shoulder with her key ring bouncing on her middle finger. Lilah reaches out one hand as soon as she sees Maggie, leaning sideways out of Marty’s arms until her grandmother stands up to pull her close.

“Between you and Rust, guess I’m gonna be chopped liver all weekend,” Marty snorts, though he smiles as he watches Maggie smooth the baby’s hair down and press a kiss to her temple. “Just part of the scenery.”

“You better be good while mommy and Gigi are gone, Mercedes Delilah,” Audrey says, stepping up to raise her eyebrows at her daughter before her face cracks into a smile. Lilah babbles something to her mother and then reaches down again, gently touching the gold feather clasped at Maggie’s neck with careful little fingers.

“Gee?” she asks in her tiny baby voice, and Maggie smiles through the tightness welling somewhere in her throat, trying not to look at either of the two men standing close nearby.

“Gigi’ll be back on Sunday,” she says, and blinks a few times too fast when she passes Lilah back over to Marty. “Be sweet for Grampa and Poppy, okay?”

She and Audrey still have a two-hour drive ahead of them that’ll pull them closer to Austin down in Texas. A gallery showing on Saturday evening and then the rest of the weekend to themselves, and she’s been looking forward to a small retreat for a while now but still can’t shake off the little tug of guilt hanging around her neck as the baby touches her necklace.

“Miss Lilah’s always a perfect little lady,” Marty murmurs, smiling as Audrey leans in to kiss her goodbye. “We’ll be alright here, y’all go and enjoy yourselves down in Texas. Maybe sell a few of those masterpieces so me and Rust can finally retire.”

When Audrey starts the car Maggie tries not to pointedly look out the window and then wonders why she’d even had such a thought in the first place. She glances up through the glass and smiles at a halfway familiar picture, watching as Marty holds the baby’s hand up to wave bye-bye while her hair ruffles in the breeze like dandelion fluff. Rust slides off the truck tailgate and closes it back up, turning to murmur something to Marty that Maggie can’t hear while he throws up a few fingers in a parting salute.

“They make a cute little picture, don’t they,” Audrey snorts, shaking her head as she turns off the residential street and starts back on the road that’ll lead them out of town. “I keep meaning to take one for Dad and I always forget.”

“Can’t say it’s one I ever thought I’d see,” Maggie says, reaching up to fix the feather on her necklace again. She turns to gaze out the window but doesn’t quite see anything past the glass, lost inside a thought while the outskirts of Lafayette slide by in a passing blur. “Strange how it kind of suits them now, in a way.”

Audrey looks over on a glance with her mouth pursed up into a wry kind of smile. “How do you mean?”

Maggie gnaws some on her bottom lip until she’s bitten the pinkness back into it, fiddling with the tassel on her pocketbook where it rests in her lap. “I don’t know,” she says. “I just can’t remember the last time I looked at your father and really thought anything about—family.”

“Mmm,” Audrey offers after a long moment, popping on her blinker to slide into a turning lane. “I guess so.”

“Does it bother you at all?” Maggie asks her daughter in a voice more plaintive than she’d wanted, turning to watch Audrey over the console. “That he only settled down and decided to be an honest family man inside the past two years.”

“Maybe it surprised me a little, but I can’t say it’s been anything I’ve lost a ton of sleep over,” Audrey says, looking ahead out the windshield with her jaw squared just a bit. And if she doesn’t look and sound just like Marty in this moment, with that echo of bulldog determination set like stone into her features.

“You know I haven’t lost any sleep,” Maggie says. “That’s not what this is about.”

Audrey’s eyes finally slide over when the car slows at a red light and it’s blue on blue, one shade of cool fire for another. “If you want to say something about him and Rust, Mom, go ahead and spit it out. God knows you were acting weird the whole time we were there.”

“Please,” Maggie says with a harsh little laugh, raking a hand back through her hair. “Audrey, I just…listen. Sometimes I have to sit and wonder why he only found it in himself to change for that man. Not me, even though I gave him the chance—not us.”

“Maybe not then,” Audrey says more softly, looking up at her mother. “But he seems to be trying now.”

Maggie heaves out a sigh, flipping the air vents away from herself to keep the cold air from blowing too much on her arms. “Trying,” she repeats, looking away again. “For Rustin Cohle.”

It’s quiet in the car for a while, and the light changes again before Audrey clears her throat. This time her face and voice don’t hold the faintest hint of anything that’s Marty.

“I don’t think he changed for Rust,” she says. “At least not as much as Rust changed him.”

Maggie’s eyes narrow and cut back over. ‘That doesn’t make any—”

“What happened led you to where you are now, though,” Audrey says, chewing on her bottom lip as she watches the cracked asphalt unfold in front of them. “If things hadn’t gone the way they did, you wouldn’t have met Ted. You wouldn’t have bought your dream house, found somebody who supported you in advancing your career, seen Egypt or Paris or Spain. Come to think of it, Mom—I honestly don’t think you’d be happy.”

There’s a moment where Maggie nearly tells her the full story behind everything, spits out the truth before she can clamp it down between her molars. She’d planned on keeping that night in the past if it meant carrying it with her to the grave but then the girls weren’t young and naïve the second time Marty stepped out of line—and she’s scared, just for a second, that maybe Audrey’s known the truth of what she did all along.

“Divorcing your father was the best thing for all of us,” is what Maggie says instead. “Ted’s always done right by you girls, even when it wasn’t easy. He tried to be a good father when yours would—couldn’t be.”

“I think you made the right choice,” Audrey says, a touch of something softer in her voice. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say. What happened, it—it helped you find what you needed. It got you here.”

“Maybe it did,” Maggie says, closing her eyes against the afternoon sunlight coming in warm through the windshield. “I just went through hell to get there.”

“But that’s life, Mom,” Audrey says, back to sounding like her father again while she twists her hair over her shoulder with one hand. “Everybody struggles to get somewhere better if they need it bad enough.”

Audrey won’t say anything about it here, but Maggie knows she hasn’t taken most of her old medication in months—maybe hadn’t felt the need to, with Orren and the baby and the steady pace of life keeping her grounded in something sounder. And she still has her off days but they aren’t nearly as bad as they might’ve been before. One sidelong glance into the place they were ten years ago would prove that.

“So you found what you needed,” Audrey says, shrugging a bit. “And maybe it took a lot longer but I think Dad finally did, too.”

The past is full of broken glass and Maggie knows she’ll cut her hands and feet if she stays there for too long, watching angry red stain everything she touches. And maybe she won’t sweep up the mess left there but she can ponder it from a distance from where they’re standing now, close enough to remember but not enough to hurt.

“I still can’t believe it sometimes,” Maggie sighs, more to herself than Audrey. “But anybody looking at those two can tell they need each other. Marty always had more heart than he could handle but he never knew himself for shit—and then Rust had the opposite problem. Like the lion and the tin man only found what they were looking for when they ripped it out of each other.”

Audrey laughs high and loud before turning to throw a sidelong glance at her mother. “You did not just pull out a Wizard of Oz reference.”

“Tell me it doesn’t make sense.”

“Oh my God,” Audrey snorts, though she narrows her eyes to ask the next question. “Then who’s the scarecrow?”

“Both of them,” Maggie says, tapping a thoughtful finger against her lips. “Seems like they only ever accomplish anything worth half a damn when they do it together.”

Audrey shakes her head and laughs a little again, watching as they pass the first road sign spelling out the mileage between the Louisiana border and Austin. “What about Dorothy?”

“Lilah, probably. She’s definitely got them wrapped around her little finger.”

Audrey only smiles and turns the AC down, and what little stiffness was lingering in the cab of the car wafts away like thin curls of smoke.

Maggie wonders what Audrey might’ve done if instead of Lilah, she said _me._  
  


* * *  
  
  


“Be easy, now,” Rust murmurs, holding Lilah’s little hand up to smooth down the cat’s soft side where she’s sprawled in front of them on the carpet. “You remember Miss Ghost.”

Lilah makes a hushed little sound and pushes her hands into Ghost’s fur, curling her fingers there while both eyes widen in curiosity. The tip of the cat’s tail flicks but she doesn’t get up or run away, purring out a patchy rhythm while Rust rubs around her ears.

“You don’t have to do any formal introduction with a one-year-old, man,” Marty says from the couch, setting his laptop aside and pushing his reading glasses up on his head. “You just tell her ‘kitty’ and call it a day.”

“Kee,” Lilah whispers, scooting across the floor to try and grab hold of Ghost’s tail before Rust picks her up and settles her back in his lap. “Kee!”

“See,” Marty snorts, standing up from the sofa to pad across the room into the kitchen. “Jesus, my stomach’s gnawing clear through to my backbone and it ain’t even four o’clock yet.”

He rummages around in the fridge for a moment, opening and shutting the lunch meat drawer and moving the coffee creamer aside to assess the leftovers. “Running low on everything but hot sauce and baby food, looks like. Less you wanna make a meal out of grilled provolone sandwiches and deli pickles—maybe that bag of yellow rice.”

“Haven’t been out in a bit,” Rust says while he thinks about the sticky-plastic feel of melted provolone on his teeth, holding a toy up in front of Lilah to keep her eyes off the cat. “Can go somewhere if you want.”

“Like where?” Marty’s voice echoes from inside the pantry. “We’re running the two men and a baby gig this weekend, so that Mexican place you like with happy hour ain’t our winner.”

Lilah has forgone the toy to focus on Rust’s forearm, trying and failing two and three times to grab the black tattoo like it’s something she can pick up in her hand. She gets frustrated after the last attempt and lets out a little grunt, pitching herself forward out of his lap to start crawling across the floor toward the kitchen.

“I don’t care,” Rust says, hauling himself to his feet to follow behind the baby. “Long as they got a highchair and don’t mind her hollering.”

Marty’s head pokes back out of the pantry, eyes narrowed with a little grin tugging around his mouth. “Been thinking about some hot wings,” he says, trying to bite down on the wicked smile spreading across his face. “The girls at Hooters would love Lilah.”

“Mmhmm,” Rust hums, eyes still cast down as he watches the baby. “You two can go on by yourselves, then. Pick up a new girlfriend while you’re out.”

Lilah crawls until she’s sitting at Marty’s feet and then gets a handful of his jeans, hoisting herself up to stand with her tiny little pearl teeth shining in triumph. He leans down to hitch her up in the crook of one arm, the both of them eye-to-eye with Rust.

“Uh oh, guess Poppy doesn’t want chicken wings,” Marty says around a barking laugh, brows high on his forehead as he bounces once in place to make the baby giggle. “Only pretty girl he wants to be kissin’ on is you.”

Rust doesn’t say anything but goes to rinse his hands in the sink and then wets a soapy paper towel, moving over to wipe down Lilah’s hands, pressing his thumb into her palm so it opens up like a tiny pink flower. “That barbecue joint on the water was good the one time we went,” he says. “Family kinda place, I guess.”

Marty had heartburn so bad the last time they ate there that he felt like he’d swallowed flashfire, but hearing the word _family_ fall out of Rust’s mouth laps away at the memory like water on sand.

“Guess we could go back there,” he says, clearing his throat while he fidgets with the baby’s romper without really fixing it. “Sounds good.”

“Beat the rush if we go now,” Rust says, eyes cast sleepy but still bright. “You wanna head out?”

Marty goes to dig around in the diaper bag Audrey left sitting on the counter, checking that they’re stocked up on anything that might be needed in a crisis. He tries to tick off the things on a mental checklist one at a time, thinking twenty-something years was an awfully long time ago, especially when Maggie had always been the one to keep tabs on the girls when they went out.

“Think we’re ready,” he says, zipping the top one-handed before pulling the bag off the counter. “Just gotta put the baby seat in the car.”

Out in the driveway, Rust silently pulls the short straw and stoops over to start threading the belt through Lilah’s car seat in the back of the Cadillac. Marty walks through the yard with the baby still in arm while he waits, pausing to show her the yearling crepe myrtle tree still blooming in pink out front.

He stops at the end of the driveway and looks down at either end of the street like he has on most mornings since the day Lark Dufresne stepped through the front door with a gun. The pain in his scarred knee has quieted down for the most part, only ever a dull ache anymore when it rains or he’s stood on it all day, but he still holds onto Lilah tighter on something like instinct, searching the barren neighborhood street for any sign of something amiss.

Who knows what he’d be looking for anymore, but the answer comes when Rust halts at his shoulder and peers out across the summer afternoon. “You still keep an eye,” he says. It isn’t a question, and if it was they’d both know the answer.

“Every damn day,” Marty says, hitching Lilah further up on his hip. He lets his knuckles barely skim Rust’s arm as he turns to walk back up the driveway, listening to the warm breeze rustle through the treetops as a pair of familiar boots scuff along behind him.  
  


* * *  
  


“Well ain’t she just a little princess,” their waitress says, swinging a long brown braid threaded with silver over one shoulder to lean down and smile at Lilah. She’s got a smoker’s voice but it’s something only Rust’s ears could probably catch, fine-edged with a touch of sandpaper. “Prettiest customer we’ve had all day.”

The woman’s nametag reads _Beverly_ and she reaches into her half-apron to pull out a few crayons before setting them down on the white paper tablecloth. “Know she probably isn’t old enough to color, but maybe y’all can keep her entertained while you wait.”

After Beverly brings their drinks and swishes off with her rhinestone-pocket jeans glinting under the yellow lights, Rust sits back in the booth and looks around the restaurant. Old wood paneled walls tacked over with shit pulled from the state’s dumpster, most likely—rusted license plates, sun-faded movie posters, Mardi Gras paraphernalia, an old washing board, horseshoes welded into four-leaf clovers and enough neon signs to make the room glow like Christmas.  The air tastes like sugar-cured smoke and cedar and he sucks down a deep lungful of it, picking up a crayon to start doodling on the paper in front of Lilah.

“Not too many people here yet,” he says, filling in the petals on what looks like a gerbera daisy while Marty picks the paper wrapper off his silverware bundle. “Should be out before most of the drinking crowd starts coming around.”

“I take it you don’t want her around any of it?” Marty says, bending his straw so Lilah can suck up a sip of iced tea. There’s a jukebox softly playing _Pink Houses_ somewhere over by the bar and Rust tries not to think too much about the last place he remembers seeing one. “And here I was thinkin’ how fun it’d be to take her out for her first beer, when she’s old enough.”

Rust watches as the waitress starts making her way back over to their table, slowing a few booths down to top off the drinks of a middle-aged couple with two little boys in tow. “You realize how old you’ll be when she’s of age,” he says, adding a long stem and two curled leaves to the daisy. “Pushing eighty by then.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Marty snorts, looking up from squinting at his menu. “Just because a man can’t tie his own shoes and get it up anymore don’t mean he can’t enjoy a damn beer, and you better believe I’d be getting my hands on a little something to fix up that last part.”

Rust starts drawing a wing next to Lilah’s elbow, filling in the feathers with light strokes of blue and purple crayon. “Should’ve been a life coach, Marty.”

Marty makes a rough noise in the back of his throat and flips his menu shut with a flick of his wrist. “Yeah, and I imagine we’ll both be back to living as a couple old boozers by then anyhow. Shacked up in that little beach house down in Florida—some real sunshine Margaritaville shit.”

“You’d better quit talking like that in front of her,” Rust says, sniffing as he sets the crayons aside and starts rummaging around in the baby bag for Lilah’s bib. “And that’s the second time you’ve mentioned Florida. Starting to think you got your heart set.”

“Well, maybe I do,” Marty says, putting on a smile as Beverly sidles back up to the table with her notepad poised in hand. “Reckon you can come too if you want.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” Rust says without doing much to hide the quirk at the corner of his mouth. He finishes fastening the baby’s bib around her neck and gestures for Marty to go ahead and order while he produces a little animal cracker for Lilah to munch on.

Beverly tends to watch them from the corner of her eye when she thinks they aren’t looking, but she laughs with Marty and doesn’t skimp out on topping off their glasses, going through the specials menu to suggest her favorite pulled pork sandwich. Once their orders are back in the kitchen, Rust digs around in the diaper bag for the jars of baby food stowed there, setting a group of three on the tabletop.

“We’re gonna get you all set, missy,” Marty says while Lilah hums and smacks her hands on the edge of the table. “Just hold your horses for a second.”

Rust surveys the baby food jars and picks them up to compare labels. “Pear zucchini corn and apple mango kale. Never even heard of chicken orzo. What is all this?”

“Sounds like some of Audrey’s organic shi— _stuff_ _,”_ Marty says, picking up the pear zucchini corn jar to squint at the label. “Whatever happened to mashed peas and carrots? Kids used to live off grape juice and cheerios.”

“Maybe that was the problem,” Rust says, twisting the lid off the apple mango kale with a little metallic pop. He swipes the tip of his pinky finger across the lid and then brings it up to his mouth for a taste, brow creasing against the tart sweetness. “Hmm—try the other one.”

Marty narrows his eyes but picks up the pear zucchini and cracks that one open, mirroring Rust’s sampling technique once he gets a dab on his fingertip. He makes a face at the flavor but then reaches over to try the other and nods to himself, passing both back off to wipe his fingers down the condensation gathering on his tea glass. “Give her the mango, this zucchini pear stuff ain’t natural.”

Lilah squeals a little and leans forward to accept the loaded spoon Rust holds out, smiling with her cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk. The next bite dribbles down her chin and Marty leans forward to dab around her mouth with the bib, already a lost casualty of war.

“Maybe this mess’ll tide you over until the big girl food gets here,” he murmurs, looking up to meet and follow the lingering gaze of a woman who walks by in a pair of clacking wooden heels. He glances over to Rust, as patient as a sleepy-eyed saint while he waits for Lilah to take a sip of tea before humming eagerly for the next bite. “I wonder what all Audrey’s let her try since she started eating more solid food. When the girls were little Maggie nearly stroked out one time, we’d had a barbecue out back and I gave Macie a clean pork bone to gnaw on.”

“Could’ve choked,” Rust says, rescuing a drop of baby food from landing on the front of Lilah’s romper with the tip of a spoon. “I’d probably have whipped your ass, too.”

Marty shoots him a crooked look but then blinks to himself, watching Lilah reach out as if to bring Rust’s hand back faster. “Course, I wouldn’t go and do the same thing now. Like how back in my day mama used to let me and my cousin Brady go swimming in these lakes down in the Everglades when we were in Florida. Place was crawling with gators, it’s a wonder I’m still alive or in one damn piece.”

“Probably knew you wouldn’t taste any good,” Rust deadpans, peering up quick from under his lashes while he puts the lid back on the baby food jar.

“I could probably say the same on your account,” Marty snorts, “considering you didn’t get eaten up by some grizzly running around in the wilds of bumfuck Alaska.”

Beverly brings back a loaded tray to the table while Rust levels a pointed glare on Marty, arms laden down with barbecue and baked potatoes and coleslaw. Lilah’s eyes go wide as she looks at all the new food and Marty picks up a piece of potato, blowing on it and holding it up until she leans forward for a bite.

Before Rust even starts feeding himself, he goes about cutting up a little piece of brisket into tiny morsels just the right size for the baby to chew on. He goes through the motions just like he does anything else: methodical and sure-minded with his face held impassive, and Marty watches him over his own plate, caught up a little in how natural the other man looks inside these small moments.

And it’s odd to think about where they came from and how they got here, a convoluted path of fuck-ups down the hard-paved road to hell, but that isn’t the main thing weighing on Marty’s mind. He watches Rust feed Lilah one little bite at time while he alternates picking up a fork every few moments for himself, and there’s nothing forced or foreign about it, nothing that would ever indicate Rust didn’t know exactly what he was doing.

He’s so patient and gentle with this little girl that isn’t even his own flesh and blood, Marty hates to think there was ever a time when he was deprived of it. Robbed, more like, when he’d spent most of his own life taking fatherhood for granted.

“Reckon we’re about done here,” Rust murmurs, feeding Lilah a little piece of chicken that she promptly spits back out onto the table. “No way you’re swindling out of a bath tonight.”

“You think she’ll make it to bedtime without passin’ out?” Marty asks, reaching over to unbutton the baby’s bib and start wiping down her hands. “It’s only just now a quarter past five.”

Lilah’s already looking heavy-eyed in her highchair but Rust shakes his head as he takes a bite of sandwich. “Keep her up until 7:30 or so and then go for a walk,” he says, squinting a little in the thin beam of setting sunlight coming from the restaurant’s front window. “One time around the block and she’ll be out like a light.”

Marty figures he could say any number of things about Rust sliding so seamlessly into a secondhand sort of fatherhood, teasing or appreciative or otherwise, but he knows neither one of them really need to hear it. He also knows he could go and say a lot of things about himself, and maybe they wouldn’t be anything quite as kind.

The waitress drops their check off and Marty only watches as Rust unbuckles the highchair and lifts Lilah out to settle in his lap, head tipping back to wedge in the crook between his side and shoulder. She goes without a fuss or a fight and then reaches straightaway for his left hand, tiny fingers fidgeting with the gold band there as she tries to bring it up to her mouth.

Skynyrd is playing like a memory on the jukebox and sometimes Marty wonders how much of his life was built on second chances.  
  


* * *  
  


Dusk tries to break through the canopy of live oaks lining the street with prying fingers, leaving flares of dying orange to wedge through the branches and fall like strips of liquid fire on the ground. The crickets are out and singing but the neighborhood is mostly quiet for a night at the height of summer, everything sluggish and muffled under the heavy hand of humid air.

Marty steps out of the garage with Lilah in his arms, listening to the grass shush under his feet as he carries her across the lawn with a lone night bird calling overhead. Her palm is resting on his collarbone like a tiny pink starfish while she peers around the yard, and if that squint around her eyes doesn’t look familiar somehow, he’d be damned.

“Look here, Miss Lilah,” Marty says when they reach the corner of the yard, stepping over to a tall bush full of blooming red flowers he first planted himself the summer before. Lilah turns to look at the soft petals dusted with yellow pollen and immediately reaches out to touch the flower while making a hushed little sound.

“That’s a hibiscus,” Marty says, taking a step back so the flower gently falls out of her grip before she can pull it off the branch. “Ain’t it pretty?”

“Hi?” Lilah tries, expression pinched into something vaguely serious, and then she turns to peer over Marty’s shoulder when she hears another pair of feet making way through the yard.

Rust slowly saunters up with something cupped in one hand, squinting through the bands of burning sunset falling across the yard. He holds up a small gardenia blossom between two fingers that Marty knows came fresh off the flowering bush in the neighbor’s side yard and then reaches forward to tuck it behind Lilah’s ear, smoothing down her hair before he pulls away.

“Well,” Rust says, line of his mouth held soft and happy even while they watch a tiny hand come up to hold and crush the white flower in her fist. “Y’all ready for that walk?”

Lilah goes without a fuss into the stroller Audrey left behind for her, watching the world slip by and darken beneath the tree canopy. Streetlamps flicker to life and a handful of bats squeak as they flit through the air, already out and hunting mosquitoes for the night. Marty pushes the stroller with one hand with Rust ambling along at his elbow, the two of them murmuring in low tones while a thought or two passes between them.

“Peter and Eli are detailing for that fundraiser down at city hall on Monday,” Marty says, briefly watching their long shadows mingle together on the pavement. “I reckon they’ll work well together, but you never really know right off—big boys like that, sometimes they tend to step on each other’s toes.”

“You worried about it?” Rust asks, reaching up to skim Marty’s fingers as he wraps his hand around the stroller bar.

Marty sniffs and shakes his head as they take a corner around the block, moving through a pool of yellow lamplight. “Naw,” he says. “Had some trouble with security guys in the past, getting too big for their britches and all, but I think these two are sound. Military background, ten years in the business—almost more worried about them getting on with Shelley after she gave Munroe the what-for last week.”

Rust laughs a little down low in his chest. “I wouldn’t be worrying about that none,” he says. “She likes him more than she’s letting on.”

“Oh yeah?” Marty scoffs. “I guess sending  him runnin’ to the back room with his tail between his legs was a surefire sign she’s gone all twitterpated.”

“Give it a bit,” Rust says, leaning forward to peer at Lilah where she’s nodding off in her seat. “You’ll see.”

The walk isn’t a long one but Lilah is fast asleep not two minutes later, and she stays quiet as a church mouse the whole rest of the way home until the stroller rolls up over the curb. She blinks awake in the drape of falling dark and rubs her fists into her eyes, blinking up at Rust silhouetted by the light burning in the garage.

“Up and out,” he says, unbuckling the little nylon strap before he lifts her into his arms. “You ready for a bath?”

Marty brings up the rear with a newspaper in hand, soggy and wrinkled in its yellow plastic sleeve after he’d peeled it off the end of the driveway. “You think we’re gonna let this child take a single step this weekend?” he asks, watching Lilah gaze wide-eyed after a pair of lightning bugs floating just out of reach in front of the garage. “Put her down for a second, maybe we can get in some high kicks before bed.”

It’s edging on full darkness now and the warm air smells like the mouth of a cave, damp and earthy and somehow clean. The pair of fireflies dance like cigarette embers in the little wisp of a breeze and Rust sighs as he lets the baby down, setting her on her feet with both her hands held fast in his own.

Lilah takes two steps quick as a flash while Rust’s holding onto her, and Marty lets out a little hoot that echoes through the open garage.

“Try one hand,” he says, walking up to stand at the ready on Lilah’s opposite side. “She’s dead set on getting at those lightning bugs.”

Rust’s mouth tightens up for a second but then he lets one hand go, letting Lilah take a wavering step forward on her own. She’s going faster than she was earlier in the day and Marty’s all but holding his breath, keeping a hand held at the ready in case she starts stumbling.

“She might just do it,” he says, glancing up at Rust with the gap between his teeth shining. “Let her go, just for a second. I’ll catch her if she goes falling down.”

“I don’t think she’s ready yet, Marty,” Rust says, still holding onto one tiny hand. “Least not out here—be better on the carpet or the grass.”

But the baby gets her balance up underneath her and rushes forward, and all it takes is one tug and her hand slips loose from Rust’s. She takes two clean steps on her own with the fireflies still dancing too far out of reach and then both men see the moment she starts to fall, too caught inside a small jolt of private horror to react in time.

Marty goes to catch her from behind the second Rust lunges to grab her, but Lilah tips forward mid-step and goes down hard so both knees hit the concrete. There’s a brief purgatory of silence and then she’s already screaming by the time Rust remembers to draw in his next breath.

“Oh shit,” Marty hisses, stooping over to lift Lilah off the ground while her crying wails through the night air. He turns her in his arms to look at her knees and as sure as the world one’s oozing a tiny trickle of something dark and wet, already dripping down her little leg.

“I’m sorry, baby,” Marty says, kissing her temple as he tries to get her to hush. “You’re okay, it’s just a little scratch—it’s just scary, you’re alright.”

When he turns around with a hopeless sort of look cast across his face, Rust’s body looks rigid enough to bend and snap. But he takes one slow step and then another, and Marty hasn’t seen him move so stiffly in years but here and now his face and body looks like they’re carved out of petrified wood.

“Come on,” Rust says, barely audible above Lilah’s crying. “We’ve got to get her inside and look at it in the light.”

Marty carries the baby down the darkened hall to the bathroom, still shushing her and rubbing tiny circles on her back. The bathroom light flips on and Lilah’s cries have started tapering off to sniffling hiccups, but when Rust walks into the room and sees the bright red blood under the vanity bulbs all the color drains and swirls out of his face.

He sets the washcloth he’d been holding down on the sink and leans hard into the doorway before Marty looks up and does a double-take at the other man’s waxy and ashen expression. “What are you doing—?” he asks, and then sees where a few drops of blood have dripped onto the white ceramic.

“Jesus, Rust,” Marty murmurs with too much wisdom riding in those two words, maneuvering around to get a hand on Rust’s arm. He steers him into the room and then right down onto the closed toilet lid while his voice keeps firm. “I need you to hold her while I get the water going. Are—are you good, right now?”

Rust takes a deep breath and waits for the room to stop looking like somebody sharpened up the contrast enough to cut him open, and it isn’t the worst feeling he’s ever weathered but it still makes a thread of nausea prickle in his gut, just enough to make him clench his teeth while he reaches up to run a hand through Lilah’s mussed curls.

“Yeah,” he says, gently thumbing around the tear tracks at the corners of her eyes. “Come here, baby.”

Marty gently shifts her over into Rust’s arms and then starts up the hot water tap, glancing at the pair from the corner of one eye while he tests the temperature. Somehow Rust looks more worse for wear between the two of them, like an unearthed skeleton key that opens the door to one of those all-nighters he used to pull back when they worked for the state. But he curves around the baby and softly shushes against her temple, slowly coming back from wherever he’d gone off to in his head.

“Don't cry, Miss Lilah,” Rust says, tucking her up under his chin while Marty wets the dropped washcloth and bends over to dig their first aid kit out from under the sink. “Hush now, you’re alright.”

She pushes her bottom lip out and hides her face in Rust’s neck but lets Marty wash the blood and chalky dust away from her knee until there’s nothing left but a scrape no bigger than a quarter. The other knee is pink and angry but otherwise unscathed, and Marty goes to unwrap a bandage before he straightens back up with a grunt and shakes his head.

“Needs a bath before we put anything on it,” he says, moving around Rust’s legs to jimmy the tub faucet so water starts running. He throws a clean cloth in the bottom of the tub and plugs up the drain, flicking the water off his hand. “Help me start getting her shoes off, I gotta go get the baby shampoo and start warming up that load of towels.”

Marty disappears down the hall and Rust makes cursory work of getting Lilah in the tub, fishing a plastic cup out from under the sink to start rinsing her hair a little at a time. Her eyes are rimmed pink and he knows the warm water stings by the way she reaches down to touch her knee, but it only lasts a minute before she’s splashing in the water while he pushes her wet hair back and waits for Marty to bring the new bottle of soap.

When the other man is kneeling on a folded towel at the side of the tub and muttering complaints about his own knees, Rust climbs to his feet with a hand on Marty’s shoulder and goes to walk out the open door. “Be back in a minute,” he says, walking out into the kitchen where Ghost is sprawled at the foot of the fridge, taking advantage of the soft heat blowing off the motor.

Rust splashes water on his face at the sink and then wipes a damp hand across the back of his neck. Cooling sweat makes his shirt stick to the skin between his shoulder blades and he shrugs the button-down off to drape it over the back of a barstool, standing there under the kitchen vent in his white undershirt so the air conditioning sends another round of chills skittering across his arms.

There’d been a few more dead children, back when he wore Crash like a second black-leather-and-smoke skin. Scattered throughout four years of no-man’s land like landmines waiting to be stepped on. Travis had steered him through the wilds of Alaska for fifteen years as if one wrong step would blow a leg off at any moment, but he’d never prepared Rust for anything like that.

He’d felt each one like a fresh bullet even though none of them ever looked like the one that hurt most. And Lilah isn’t Sophia—will never have the same musical laugh, the same caramel-colored curls, Claire’s nose and his eyes—, but she’s closer, he knows, at least in the way that matters. Closer than all the rest had been.

Seeing her hurt had almost blown his knees out from underneath him.

“Rust?” Marty’s voice calls from the bathroom, loud enough to carry over the rumble of the dryer still spinning through its warm cycle. “You alright out there?”

The walk back down the hall is a quiet one, and Marty is already rinsing the last few shampoo suds out of Lilah’s hair when Rust steps back into the throw of yellow light and steam-kissed air. Something tickles the back of his mind like a feather he can’t knock away, but the dryer buzzes in the other room and Marty passes him the plastic cup before the thought breaks surface.

“Back on duty, Poppy,” he murmurs, pushing himself off the floor with a few joints popping along the way. “My knees can’t take this shi—uh, _crap_ _._ I’ll bring back a towel in a minute when she’s ready.”

When he’s gone, Rust kneels back in his place and fishes the washcloth out of the water. He runs on autopilot for a few moments and immediately drops a dollop of baby shampoo in the heart of one hand before working it into the cloth, and it isn’t until he’s gently soaping up her arms that time really catches him.

Lilah looks up at him with beads of water clinging to her long lashes, almost like morning dew caught in a spider web, and that’s all it takes for everything to fall into place like a line of toppled dominoes. The smell, the taste, the unmistakable sensation of something nearly thirty years gone—the balmy air and the ache in his knees from kneeling on the tile, the rumbled spell of running water and the unchanged scent of baby shampoo burning his senses down to an old foundation long since covered up.

For the two years he had her, this was one of the few things he and Sophia made a quiet ritual out of. His weekdays were measured in long hours working on-call for Houston and by the time Rust would drag himself back home to the little house at the bend in the road he busted his ass to pay for, they’d only ever have enough time for dinner and a bath and a story or two if he was lucky. Two years and those are the few things he knows he was given.

Now, those are some of the only things he remembers.

A choked sob echoes through the bathroom and Rust doesn’t know it was him until he brings a hand up to his mouth and feels another breath hitch and break there. But by then he can’t stop, can’t do anything but sink down to the floor and slump back against the wall while the baby watches him with wide blue eyes, little rosebud mouth parted while she stops splashing in the water.

When Marty rounds the corner into the doorway a minute later, he nearly drops the stack of folded towels he’d been carrying when he finds Rust slumped next to the tub with his face in his hands, shoulders shaking with each little hitch in his breath.

Lilah is fine, still playing in the water and pushing the plastic cup around amidst a chorus of content little noises, and Marty’s jaw works on a loose hinge for a moment before he can will himself to move.

“What the hell happened?” he blurts out, and it wasn’t meant to sound so loud in the small room but Rust slowly pulls his hands away from his face, both eyes red and swollen from crying.

He blearily looks at Marty and then down at the floor, coughing as he reaches up to yank a piece of toilet paper off the roll to wipe around his nose. Lilah squeals a little as she gets both hands on the edge of the tub and pushes herself up to stand, but Marty doesn’t miss the tear that drips off the edge of Rust’s nose as he watches her.

“I’m sorry,” Rust says, voice sandpapered raw in his throat, and that’s all he can manage to get out before he shakes his head and stands, brushing past the other man to disappear down the dark hallway.

Marty hears a door open and shut somewhere else in the house and bites into his bottom lip. He sets the towels down and then yanks one off the top of the stack, immediately going over to start bundling Lilah out of the bath.

“Let’s get you in some jammies, ladybug,” he says, trying to return her little smile in kind. She yawns as he towels off her hair, and then they both head toward the bedroom where a fresh diaper and set of pajamas are already laid out on the bed.

Marty worries his lip while he makes a mess of powdering Lilah’s legs, quickly buttoning her up into her little ivory romper patterned with stars and sleepy-looking lilac clouds that look like they took one too many hits off a bottle. When she’s dressed he picks her up from the bed and then stands in a momentary sort of limbo, glancing between the doorway and her playpen set up at the foot of the bed.

“Alrighty,” Marty says with a sigh, lowering Lilah down into the playpen before slipping her a pacifier. She lays down on her little palette and blinks up at him as she rubs around her eyes. “You behave yourself for a minute, Grampa’s gotta go check on Poppy.”

Marty isn’t sure what he’s going to do or say when he finds Rust, but he goes looking for him anyway. And for all the man’s running off like a spooked animal he doesn’t take long to find, in the end—standing out on the back porch in the dark with a wind chime made of glass stars tinkling nearby.

The sliding door opens and shuts but Rust doesn’t move. For a second Marty looks for the burning tip of a cigarette like something to guide him over, but there isn’t one. He steps up to Rust’s side anyhow, not touching him yet, only looking through the porch screen at the black-licked yard. There’s just enough light bleeding from inside the living room to make out the pale blue of Lilah’s plastic pool settled a few feet away from the awning.

“Where’s the baby?” Rust asks. His voice isn’t as cracked as it was before but he still sounds a touch hoarse, clearing his throat while Marty works up the momentum to answer.

“In her playpen, gettin’ ready to go down for the night,” he says, reaching up to brush along one side of his nose. “She’s fine. But I came out here to ask about you.”

Rust still won’t look at Marty when he speaks. “Oh, I’m alright,” he says. “Nothing worth worrying over—just got caught up on the edge of something for a minute.”

“Don’t stand there and try to bullshit me,” Marty snorts. “You don’t even sound like yourself right now. And I reckon you crying on the bathroom floor in front of the grandbaby is something I ought to worry about if I want to, so maybe you should go ahead and tell me what that was all about.”

His words linger and die on the air and Rust is quiet for a few long moments, the space between them filling up with chirping cricket song drifting down from the trees.

“I hadn’t—” he starts, sighing as his eyes cast down toward their feet. “Just the…the baby soap, man. The—smell, you know.” He makes a vague gesture with one hand, trying to pull the right word free from his head. “Triggers.”

Rust’s hand comes back up to his mouth for a moment before it falls away. “It’s been a real long time,” he says, voice sounding a little more brittle than before. “Sometimes I forget how long.”

And Marty hates hearing him sound so small and broken, hates it down to the fiber and sheer blind luck still mending his bones together when he has to see Rust cry. So he figures they’ve done their little piece, and he knows what Rust means without really asking, so he closes the rest of the distance between them and wraps an arm around the other man to pull him in close.

Rust only stiffens up for a moment before he curves into Marty like they were built to fit that way, hands coming up to settle low around his back. It isn’t any tight or urgent kind of embrace, the two of them leaning into one another more than anything else, but Marty turns his head enough that the tip of his nose brushes behind Rust’s ear.

“You’re a lot stronger than you like to think, sometimes,” he says, sliding a hand up Rust’s back. “The fact that you’re still standing here says as much. So maybe don’t go so hard on yourself, babe.”

A hot welt is burning in Rust’s throat and he can’t really answer so he only nods, trying to will the right words into Marty through touch alone while he presses his mouth into the soft material covering the other man’s shoulder.

“And there’s no reason to run and hide, at least not from me,” he say, pressing a lopsided kiss somewhere in Rust’s hair. He laughs to himself but it sounds a little breathless. “Guess I’ve had my fill of chasing your ass away, y’know. So I’m here when you need me—all the time, for whatever the fuck it is.”

Rust nods again, tightening his arms around Marty before clearing his throat. “I know, Marty,” he rasps out, and then turns his face into the other man’s hand when he feels familiar fingers brace against the side of his jaw.

Marty’s thumb grazes that little scar beneath Rust’s eye and then he’s leaning in through the dark, just enough to pass along a brush of a kiss that makes a spark of something warm break and unfurl through Rust’s stomach.

And then Marty’s pulling back, gently sliding a hand down to the dip in Rust’s side. “Well,” he says. “You wanna help me put this kid to bed?”

Rust nods with nothing more than a tilt of his lashes and gestures for Marty to lead the way, the two of them stepping off the porch and trailing together back through the quiet house.

Back in the bedroom Lilah sits up and blinks at them with sleepy eyes, pacifier idly working in her mouth while she watches both men strip down to their boxers and undershirts. Rust walks over to look down into the playpen and she pulls herself to her feet, holding one arm up toward him while she mumbles something soft around the binky.

“Go on and take her for a bit,” Marty says through a half-stifled yawn, making a point of busying himself with digging around for the TV remote in the bedside table. “Audrey says she still takes a bottle at bedtime—I’ll go fix one here in a second.”

The space behind Rust’s eyes still feels like it was scrubbed with steel wool but when he holds his hands out Lilah offers both of hers up in return, letting him lift her out of the playpen. They make a slow lap around the room to turn the TV on and then Rust is settling down on his side of the bed, rubbing circles on the baby’s back while she curls up against him and fists her hands in his shirt.

“Somebody must be feelin’ a little cuddly tonight,” Marty says with an odd little slant to his voice, walking out the doorway and down the hall. “Be back in a minute.”

Lilah is a quiet and warm weight against his chest and stomach and Rust smoothes his hand over her head while he watches the television screen, not really seeing anything more than flickering shapes of color. When Marty comes back he’s got a bottle in hand, and passes it over without a word once he’s sliding onto his side of the bed.

The baby is already halfway asleep at half past eight but she takes it anyhow with some of Rust’s murmured coaxing, lashes dipping lower and lower until she’s fast asleep in his arms. And neither man is quite ready for bed but they stay there in unspoken agreement, watching some wilderness program on the tube while Lilah breathes softly from where she’s curled up in the crook of Rust’s arm.

When the show cuts to commercial Marty does the same with his eyes, glancing over so they skirt along Rust’s face. He’s dozing now, features softened and easy, but shifts his legs under the sheet once Marty’s looking.

“Hmm?” he hums, not bothering to open his eyes.

“You alright?” Marty asks, lightly tracing the tip of his middle finger along the remote buttons. “I can put her down, if you want.”

Rust only sinks down lower against the pillows without disturbing the baby and lets out a low sigh. “S’alright,” he says, curving one hand up to brace over Lilah’s back. “I’m good.”  
  


* * *  
  


Once the sun has climbed up the eastern side of the yard and started stretching toward the midmorning point in the sky, Marty goes out to drag a few fingers through the blue plastic pool and deems the water warm enough to splash in.

Rust is still nose-down in the morning crossword puzzle when Marty trails back inside, twisting his chewed pen between two fingers while he squints at the page and counts blanks under his breath. Lilah is set up in her booster seat at the table, making a soggy mess of her little star-shaped rice crackers and a sippy cup full of milk. She lets out a holler when she sees Marty pad back in the kitchen, and Rust doesn’t even have to look up as he holds out a hand to catch the cup she tries to knock onto the floor.

“Already warmed up out there,” Marty says from over by the sink, rinsing off a handful of grapes before popping one into his mouth. “I gotta plant those geraniums before they croak sitting in that pot over by the garage, so if you wanna pull pool duty I imagine that’s probably the easier of the two jobs.”

“That’s fine,” Rust says, pushing away from the kitchen table to stand. He abandons his unfinished crossword in favor of cleaning up Lilah’s crackers by dumping the whole plastic mat into the trash, moving around the kitchen to dampen a cloth for her hands.

“Don’t you got a pair of shorts you can put on?” Marty wonders aloud, contemplating Rust’s white undershirt and sweatpants knotted at the waist. “Hedging all bets you’re gonna get soaked—plus it’s the height of August out there, I don’t want you keeling over for the sake of Levis.”

Rust looks up from under his brows while he unbuckles Lilah and lifts her out of the booster seat. “Nope,” he says, unsnapping her bib and setting it on the counter. “You know I don’t wear shorts.”

“Maybe I got a pair you can borrow, then,” Marty says, scratching through the whiskers along his jaw. “Since we’re a little closer in size nowadays.”

Back in the bedroom, Lilah sits in the middle of the bed with her little purple bathing suit already pulled up and tied at the shoulders, ruffles blooming out at the legs. She’s got a white cotton sun hat pulled over her ears and watches Marty’s hands as he works sunblock into her arms and shoulders, wrinkling her face when he leaves a dollop of white on the tip of her nose.

“Your mama’s already gonna whip us for letting you fall and bust your knee,” he murmurs, making sure to cover the tops of her feet and hands with the sunscreen. “We ain’t taking any chances.”

Rust steps into a pair of Marty’s black basketball shorts and pulls them up over his hips, only halfway surprised when they sit snug and don’t make any effort to fall down around his knees.

“Hoo boy, take a look at those white gams,” Marty teases, cutting his eyes over to Rust with the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth. He picks Lilah up and walks over to stand at Rust’s shoulder, arching an eyebrow at their joint reflection in the half-mirror above the dresser. “Stare too long and we might go blind.”

“Ain’t that bad,” Rust says with a sniff, reaching up to straighten Lilah’s hat before holding open his arms. She leans right into him and wraps her arms around his neck, and the smell of baby sunblock and the weight of a toddler in his arms tries to snag another bruised memory loose but Rust steps around it, mouth quirking up instead when Marty cops a feel through the shorts on their way out the door.

  
  


The clementine tree is dormant for the summer but it’s even bigger and greener than it was the year before, and looking at it now—two feet taller than Marty and closing in on three times as wide—, it’s hard to believe he and Rust ever pulled it out of a plastic pot as a yearling and folded it into the ground.

He sits in its paltry shade with a hand trowel, loosening up dirt for the potted geraniums waiting nearby. The sprinklers ran earlier in the morning and the ground is still damp under the sun-warmed sand, and as Marty digs deeper he churns up the sweet smell of wet earth.

Rust is perched on the edge of a lawn chair next to the plastic kiddie pool, holding Lilah so she can kick around in the few inches of water. Marty looks up from his digging to watch them for a moment, eyes following Rust as he reaches into the water to gently splash some up on the baby’s legs.

“You know what I hadn’t realized,” Marty says, wiping the back of one hand across his forehead as he squints across the yard. “Harriet Davis said something in passing about seeing our names in the paper a few weeks back, and it didn’t even occur to me what she was talking about ‘til now.”

A familiar squint draws up to meet his for a moment before dropping back down to keep an eye on Lilah as she wedges herself between his knees and holds up a little plastic toy. “Two years since Carcosa,” Rust says, watching the sun’s glare rippling gently on the water. “They must’ve run the story again.”

“Yeah, but—maybe don’t say that word in front of the baby, anymore,” Marty says, suddenly wishing he’d thought to bring a bottle of water out with him. He sets his trowel aside, spade-down in the dirt, and swallows against the dryness sticking in his craw. “I don’t want her going around repeating it.”

Rust looks up again for a long moment before he blinks, though he doesn’t make any move to fight Marty on it. “Alright,” he says, one low word barely audible across the yard.

Marty nods and gathers his feet back up underneath him, casting a sidelong look at the potted geraniums still sitting in the shade while he brushes his hands off. He walks through the grass to unravel another few feet of hose from the hook on the side of the house, and when he’s bent at the waist with his ass in the air a splash of water arcs through the yard and rains down on his backside.

“What the—?” he grunts, dropping the hose and straightening back up to peer quick over his shoulder.

Rust is still sprawled in the lawn chair with his feet in the pool, features tuned as smooth as polished marble. He’s not giving anything away but Lilah’s face splits into a grin the second she sees Marty whip around, a peal of laughter ringing across the yard like some bell-and-whistle music.

“Think you’re real slick, huh,” Marty says, throwing Rust a look before turning back to keep unwinding the hose. “Ought to come over there and teach you a lesson.”

“A lesson,” Rust drawls, reaching down to fix the ruffles on Lilah’s bathing suit with his lashes cast low. “What kind would that be?”

Marty snorts as he coils the water hose up in the crook of one elbow, hanging there like a green rubber snake. “One I’m gonna have to teach you later, on account of the grandbaby being here in the meantime to save your ass.”

Rust doesn’t say anything, but as Marty hauls the hose back over to his tilled plot of earth he could’ve sworn he saw a sliver of a smile. It takes ten minutes to get the flowers in the ground, red and fuchsia blossoms pulled from their pots and tucked and folded into the warm earth. They get a brief shower once they’re planted, Marty pressing his thumb into the mouth of the hose until the water sprays out in a wide fan.

He’s half-tempted to drink out of the spigot once he’s done, but the water’s nearing lukewarm and his mouth tightens up at the prospect of a tall glass of ice water and some of the fruit still sitting by the sink. Rust is already looking a little browner in the face than he did that morning as Marty turns to tread back up to the porch, letting the screen door swing shut behind him as he steps under the cooler awning.

“Be back out in a few,” he says. “You two gonna be alright out here?”

Lilah has plopped down in the water and is busy making splashing waves with her plastic pony. Rust looks up and settles back in his chair, hands hanging off the ends of the armrests. “She’s still going strong,” he says, stretching one leg out further into the pool. “We’ll be fine.”

The cool drape of air conditioning slips over Marty like satin the second he steps inside and shuts the door, and he checks his socks again before padding over to the kitchen to get a glass out of the cabinet. He palms a few ice cubes out of the freezer and then ponders a tray of frozen chicken before pulling that out to thaw, too.

He goes hunting for the abandoned bag of yellow rice from the night before and sets it next to the stove, making a mental note to pull up a recipe or two later when it gets closer to dinnertime. They’ve got a few more jars of spice in the pantry these days now that Rust’s got something to say about it, and Marty’s digging around beau monde and garlic salt when a tiny laugh tickles up his throat, surprising him when it bursts forth into the empty kitchen.

The refrigerator is ticking quietly and Marty considers the half-empty jar of paprika in one hand before setting it down on the counter. He goes to take another sip of his ice water and then braces both hands at the edge of the sink, peering out through the window while he tries to remember how the fuck he got here.

It’s a background kind of thought and realization these days—something that only catches him in the edge of the mirror or slipping around corners. He wakes up every damn morning lying next to another man in the bed or passing him a hot cup of coffee in the kitchen, and somewhere along the line all that shifted into something that made good sense. There’s another baby girl he’s got in his life, one he’s trying to do better with, and he gets to see her as much as his daughter will let him—which is maybe a lot more than he ever deserved, considering.

But he’s glad for it, of course. Every damn day.

Marty wipes a hand over his mouth and blows out a sigh, turning to lean back against the sink. He sees the cat’s dish over by the pantry and shakes his head around the wry little smile tugging around his mouth, and when he’s going to dig around for a potato or two under the sink the sound of the landline ringing cuts through the kitchen.

The number on the screen has an out-of-state area code and the name that shows up reads nothing but _Santos_ _._ Marty doesn’t know any Santos from Adam or Eve but presses the green button and holds the phone up to his ear anyhow, clearing his throat before he speaks into the receiver. “Martin Hart speaking.”

The line on the other end is silent for a moment, and Marty readying to write the call off as a dud when a woman’s voice cuts through the airspace, sharp and clear but with a hint of something he can’t place.

“Uh—hello,” she says, letting out a shaky breath on the tail end of a fragile-boned laugh. “I didn’t really think you’d pick up the phone.”

Marty feels the seam between his brows tighten as he wedges a hip against the counter. “Can I help you, ma’am?” he asks, drumming his fingers one time on the cool granite. “If you’re calling for Investigative Solutions I can’t say I’m too privy to how you got this number—it’s a private landline we don’t make public knowledge.”

“No, no, I was just—looking to talk to you, really,” the woman says. “Funnily enough I had to go through my own investigator to get your number. I couldn’t…well, I didn’t want to risk talking to anybody else, if you understand.”

Despite the edge of nerves there her voice is still warm and strong, but Marty’s jaw tightens up all the same. “Can’t say I do,” he says, shifting his weight to both feet where he stands. “Listen, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but I’ve dealt with a lot of fucked-up people in my day and if you don’t want to give me a name or a reason, I’m hanging up this phone and using it to put in a call downtown.”

When it comes back, the woman’s voice slices through the tension strung through the line like softened butter. “Claire Santos,” she says. “You might be more familiar with Claire Cohle, though.”

Marty’s mouth is open but he doesn’t know it until a bubble of air catches and wilts in his throat. He blinks and bites into his lip, leaning hard against one palm spread flat like an anchor on the countertop. “I’ve heard the name before,” he says as carefully as he can, thoughts reeling a mile a minute in the back of his head. “Been a while, though. Is there something I can help you with?”

Claire lets out another little laugh, this time something more uncomfortable. “I think process of elimination could get us to the right answer,” she says. “Since I’m pretty sure we only have one big thing in common.”

“Yeah?” Marty tosses back, not feeling like he wants to cater to this woman’s games today. “And what might that be?”

Her voice withers a little around the familiar name, and if it tastes like honey in Marty’s mouth he knows it tastes like the real thing in hers. “Rust,” she says, an old and unused syllable that sounds like it was mined from the back of her throat, but once his name’s in the air everything behind it rushes out freely. “I just—I saw your names in the paper last month. They ran a story in Texas, God, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about…that place in the woods, made national headlines a few years back, all the bodies they dug up—I’m sorry. This is the first time in years I’ve thought about reaching out to him and I know he doesn’t want to speak to me anymore, but I thought…Jesus, I just thought—”

“Thought what?” Marty asks, all the old southern charm bled out from his voice. “You still haven’t answered about why you’re calling this number in particular.”

Claire is quiet for a skipping moment. “Mr. Hart, I promise there’s no need for—any kind of enmity,” she says, more cool and composed than before. “I understand you’re trying to protect him.”

Marty’s grip around the phone tightens but he doesn’t show his hand just yet. “Of course I’d try and protect him. He’s a—he’s a good man, who doesn’t need this kind of shit knocking down his door for no good reason.”

He wets his lips and wonders if it might really be her, if this is the dark-eyed woman he’s imagined through little wisps of memory that fell out of Rust’s mouth like incense smoke. “How do I know if you’re who you say you are?” he tries when Claire doesn’t answer, clearing his throat. “Can you prove you’re—well.”

“I can tell you any number of things,” she says, a thread more hesitant now. “I don’t know if you’d have the context for them. The man I knew, I haven’t spoken to in probably twenty years.”

Something faintly clicks on the other end of the line, maybe an earring clacking against the receiver, while Claire draws in a breath. “Yeah, it was twenty this past June,” she says. “They discharged him out of that place in Lubbock two days before the day she—the anniversary. That was the last time we saw each other.”

Marty hears Lubbock and knows Rust’s files are still sealed, knows anything like that would have to be leaked out of a deadlocked filing cabinet or shared on his own volition. “What else?” he asks, a touch softer than before. He doesn’t know what else to say, doesn’t know if he even wants to say it, but then Claire starts speaking for him.

“Takes his coffee black, puts Tabasco original on everything he can get away with. He came out of somewhere in Alaska when he was seventeen—we met in Houston after he’d gotten out of the service. All he had to his name back then was a twin mattress above the Latin grocery and a few boxes of books. One of the first things I bought him was a table fan so we wouldn’t roast to death in that goddamn room he rented.”

Claire takes a breath and is quiet for another moment, long enough for Marty to peer out the sliding door to watch Rust stand and help Lilah take a few steps through the water. He thinks back to his own pool of memories from two decades lost, about the pair of lawn chairs he’d dug out of the garage and left in the bed of Rust’s truck in silent offering.

“Yeah,” he says, and she must know she’s got him now, with the truth rattling right there in his voice. “That sounds familiar.”

“God, it’s like I don’t know what to say now,” Claire says, breaking back in. “I guess…he’d gotten those tattoos in the four years I didn’t see him—the bird and the cross. I didn’t know they were real at first. But then after all that he didn’t look very real anymore, either.”

Marty doesn’t want her to fall any further down that rabbit hole, can’t even begin to imagine though he’s probably tried a hundred different times. “Claire—can I call you Claire?” he asks. “Not for nothing, and I believe you—I do—, but I don’t…well, I still can’t say I know why you’re calling here.”

He leaves it hanging there, hoping she’ll catch his meaning in the open end of the sentence. _After twenty years. After what happened to you two. After he’d finally moved on to something different, after we got this fucking far._

“You were the only contact I could find,” Claire says, pitched quiet. “Seeing your names together in the paper and then the years behind all that, I thought it’d be a good place to start. Especially since you two run that firm together now—Hart and Cohle Investigative, I guess it is. I’m surprised Rust is still in the business.”

“He’s a fine detective,” Marty says, resolute. “Always has been, long as I’ve known him.”

There’s a hint of smile in Claire’s voice, come and gone in a flash. “If there ever was a man to get something done, he’d be the one to do it. He always had so much—what’s the word? _Tenacity_ _._ But at the time I just thought he was stubborn.”

“Anyhow,” she breathes out in a sigh that Marty can almost feel against his ear. “I didn’t call to ask for anything, if that’s worrying you. But if you’re in any position to tell me, I wanted to see—just to know, maybe, how he’s doing. If he’s…doing better, now.”  The next few words almost break but not quite, keeping steady held altogether. “If he’s okay.”

“Why now, all a sudden?” Marty asks. “After twenty years.”

“Maybe time wearing down old wounds,” Claire says, sounding a little like a distant echo. “Curiosity, some honest disbelief that the man is still alive. The last time I saw him, I knew it’d be the last—but maybe for a different reason, back then.”

The familiarity of that thought hits Marty so hard he has to grip the counter for support while his knees seem to sway underneath him. “Yeah,” is all he can manage to say. “Yeah.”

Silence fills the airspace between them for a few beats. Marty breathes deep through his nose and wonders when Rust is going to come looking for him, what lie he’ll have to spin out before he puts the phone back on the cradle and acts like none of this ever happened. Wonders why he’s even stayed on the phone this long, with a woman he doesn’t know for a reason he can’t really figure.  
  
“For what it’s worth,” Claire says, breaking back into his thoughts, “I loved him once. A long time ago. Maybe—maybe you’d understand, then. Why I’m calling now.”

Marty does know, and even more with every goddamn breath drawn into his body. But he doesn’t say that yet.

“It’s hard for him still, some days,” he finally says. “I’m sure it is for you, too. And I don’t really know but I do, in a way—and I’m sorry.”

“It was,” Claire almost whispers. “It is.”

“But he’s happier now than he was when I first met him. I—I think that’s got to be worth something. Shit,” he says, wondering if she can hear his heart stutter over the phone, “I even get to see him laugh sometimes.”

The silent smile is back in Claire’s voice on the other end of the line. “You two are good friends, then?”

Something drops in Marty’s stomach but doesn’t quite twist or coil there. “Yeah,” he says, unsure of how much she might’ve seen in Rust when she knew him, unsure of what it was he might’ve shown her through a certain slant of light. “Something—somethin’ like that.”

“Something like that,” Claire echoes into the phone, and Marty knows she wants to ask but decides he doesn’t want to give her the satisfaction of pulling it out of him.

“We live together,” he says, a little more steady on his feet. “Have for a few years now. Got to say I’m in a position now where I prefer it that way for—for the long run.”

He doesn’t offer anything more than that but Claire hears the unspoken meaning right off and her voice sharpens up just a fraction, and Marty knows right then that Rust didn’t find a companion in this woman because she was any kind of stupid.

“I see,” she says, more thoughtful than anything else. “I didn’t know, but I’m not…well, it’s not anything too surprising. Rust was always just—Rust.”

“Yeah,” Marty breathes out, eyes flicking up to look through the sliding door again. “That he is.”

“Well, I’m glad he—has somebody like you,” Claire says, less awkward than he might’ve imagined, though he knows she’s got the reigns held tight. “That’s the most important thing, because God knows the man used to try and take care of everything but himself.”

Marty thinks about how much shit changes and then how much it doesn’t; about broken tail lights and empty cigarette cartons and turning bottoms-up on a baby bottle instead of the last few fingers of Jameson. And maybe he never was much of a writer or an artist, but he figures if she got this far with nothing but concerned curiosity on her mind, he might as well try and paint her a picture.

“We got a little house with a half-assed garden I mostly fool around in,” Marty says, looking out the back window again. “It ain’t nothing too special but it’s home for the both of us, I guess. And Rust wouldn’t ever say so but he likes it better with the flowers than without them—you probably know how he is with colors and stuff.”

“I remember,” Claire says, keeping quiet to let Marty go on. He’s standing inside a memory where Rust has a handful of dried marigold bulbs, and he watches the other man rub them into the heart of his palm so the sweet-smelling seeds crumble and flutter into the black dirt before he continues.

“You’d probably never believe this because I know I sure as shit didn’t at the time, but we went looking for a dog one time and he wound up bringing home a cat. Pretty little thing, though—calico color, guess you’d call it. Two of them are thick as thieves.”

Marty doesn’t know how much else he’s willing to give her, if he’s already said too much or not nearly enough, but when she stays quiet he finds he’s got a little more on the tip of his tongue to share.

“Got a lot more time to draw these days—I’ve been asking him to paint up something for the house for a while, we’ll see if he ever gets around to it. But we stay busy for the most part; still got work, keeping up with chores around here. And I got two kids from my first m—uh, my ex-wife. Two grown girls that we try and keep up with when we can. Oldest has got a baby of her own, little girl just turned one in July.”

That seems to jar something loose and Claire’s breath hitches the faintest bit on the other side of the line, like a fish testing the bait that’ll reel it in for good. “Does he—?” she starts to say, pausing to gather in a few more brittle words. “Is he good with her?”

And Marty looks into his back yard and tells her what he sees—what he knows and what he’s learned, some of the fragile things Rust had cut from the cloth of himself and laid out for Marty to touch.

“They’re out back right now, actually,” he says, laughing a bit winded despite himself. “We got a little pool for her to play in, you know the old plastic ones—and he’s got her splashing in the water. Been out there playing for over an hour now, reckon they’re having a pretty good time with it.”

“We used to go to the beach,” Claire says, something wet and runny in her voice. “He loved to take her—take Sophia there.”

“He’s real good with the baby, with Lilah,” Marty says, trying to swallow against the lump rising in his throat, and he doesn’t know how it got there but it hurts enough to make his eyes water. “I don’t know how he ever couldn’t be, watching him with her now. Because he’s got so much to give, you know? So—so much love, I guess, that he kept to himself for a real long time.”

Marty’s crying now, with this woman he doesn’t know and never will know on the phone, the two of them only linked together through the broken parts of a single man. “And it fucking…Jesus, it sets me back on my heels sometimes,” he says, shaking his head like he still can’t quite believe it. “Just how much he—he really is.”

Claire’s voice shatters in a sob, then, dropped like a tiny sherry glass over the line. “I never would’ve thought,” she says, words broken in Marty’s ear. “I never thought he’d get any better—that he’d be okay again, after what happened.”

“It took a while, maybe,” Marty says, not bothering to scrub at his eyes with nobody here to see him cry. “It wasn’t easy, but he—he’s stronger than people think.”

“I never did get married again,” Claire says, words gone watery enough that they nearly slip through his fingers. “I never could think of another baby after her. But I’m glad he did,” she sobs. “I’m glad he found what he needed.”

“And you don’t gotta worry,” Marty says a little thickly when he can talk again, running the back of one hand under his nose while he blinks too fast to clear his vision. “I’m taking care of him, least as much as he’ll let me—so he’s been doing good. Real good.”

Marty pulls in a shuddering breath as he looks back up through the sunlight coming through the sliding door, past his glass stars hanging from the awning, to what he loves still sitting outside.

“That’s all I needed to know,” Claire says, laughing weakly now through the lingering tears in her voice. “But he—he doesn’t have to know I called, if you don’t want to tell him. There’s no reason he has to get caught up in worrying about something like this—I just had to make sure for myself, you know. And it was so good talking with you, Marty.”

“I think I’ll keep this between the two of us,” Marty says, laughing a little in kind. “But I’m real glad we—you know.”

“Thank you,” is all Claire tells him, over and over like a quiet prayer. “Thank you.”  
  


* * *  
  


Marty splashes his face with cool water from the kitchen tap, knows he looks like shit and takes an ice pack from the freezer to briefly press under his eyes for good measure. The damn thing is leftover from his worst physical therapy days and it’s frozen in a vague U-shape, like somebody had probably picked it up off his knee when he was dozing on the couch and put it right back in the fridge.

Something else to cry about, maybe, but Marty sucks it up and tries to slip into a stance Rust won’t be so keen to suspect, stepping back into his shoes on the porch before trailing out into the yard with an open water bottle in hand.

The pool is still and empty now but he finds Rust and Lilah over by the crepe myrtle tree, the latter of the two taking a few quick steps while Rust holds tight onto her hands.

“Was ready to come lookin’ for you,” Rust says, tipping his face up to squint at Marty through the bright daylight before guiding Lilah around a molehill he spots in the grass.

“Uh, just got caught up for a second, started setting a few things out for supper,” Marty says with his face angled toward the ground, gathering up the hose to start dragging it over to the clementine tree. He knows the second Rust sees his face there’ll be no hiding the truth, and that’s not a chance he’s willing to roll out on the docket right now. “Pulled up a few recipes for chicken and rice.”

He goes to twist the spigot on and then follows the hose back to the tree, picking up the nozzle to water around the base until the dirt has darkened into mud. The newly-planted geraniums look pretty lounging in the shade, still a little water-dusted from their earlier shower, and Marty wonders what tastes and smells the bright colors might stir up in Rust’s head when he looks.

“What else you think we should plant out here?” he muses aloud, eyeballing the open patch of dirt circling around the tallest oak tree at one corner of the yard. “Needs some more color, I reckon.”

Rust’s voice comes delayed from somewhere behind him. “You got a good bit of color going out here already,” he says. “We aiming for the full rainbow?”

“Just might be,” Marty murmurs, kinking the hose in one hand so the water quits gushing out. He bends over again to pull a few weeds loose, tugging hard on a stubborn piece of crabgrass. “This place has been needin’ it for a long time running.”

The yard lapses into quiet for a spell, only the sound of a distant lawnmower and a few songbirds in the air. “Unless you’ve got a different idea,” Marty says, reaching for another weed. “Maybe some snow on the mountain bushes—guy down by the old furniture store in town has always got a few pretty ones for sale.”

“Marty,” Rust says, closer now than he was before.

“But hell if I’m planting any azaleas out here,” Marty says, still bent at the waist. “Damn things are butt-ass ugly and draw caterpillars like you wouldn’t belie—”

 _“Marty_ _,"_ Rust’s voice comes again, this time firm enough that he straightens up and swivels around halfway. “Turn around—look.”

“What?” Marty asks as he turns, and then the hose hits the ground to splatter his shoes with water.

Rust has both hands free, walking slowly behind Lilah as she takes two steps all her own through the grass, little arms held out for balance. She stops when she sees Marty looking to stand rooted to the spot, and he feels like all three of them are suspended here in time, caught in a bubble made of spun sugar glass.

“Come on, Miss Lilah,” Marty coaxes as gently as he can, kneeling down on the ground without a care in the world that his bad knee is aching clear up to his hip. “Come here—come see Grampa.”

Lilah makes a little cooing sound but then her brows scrunch up in something like concentration, working up the momentum to take another step forward. She makes the first one and then pauses again, looking down at her feet to let out a little wail.

“Don’t look down, babydoll, look right here,” Marty says, urging her closer. “Come on, you can do it—just a few more steps, come on.”

Rust holds his hands out to catch her but then he never needed to at the start, because Lilah bunches her fingers into fists and then toddles forward the last few steps, going so fast that she falls right into Marty’s waiting arms.

“You did it!” he crows around his laughter, scooping her up and planting a sweet kiss to her cheek that tickles enough to make her smile. “Just like a big girl.”

Rust is full-out grinning and Marty’s heart nearly bursts when he sees the dampness shining in the other man’s eyes, something different than all the hurt he’s seen there before, something bright in the blue like the sheen stolen off a pair of diamonds.

“Knew she had it in her,” he halfway rasps, moving in close to press a kiss into her hair, and Marty gets an arm around him before he has the chance to pull away, holding the baby there wedged between them while she giggles.

And there’s nothing to really say but Marty can only look at Rust and laugh through the new tears burning in his eyes, wrapping his arms around the both of them to lean in and plant one on his favorite smile.

Rust’s lips quirk up against his mouth before they pull apart and he holds onto Marty in kind, reaching up with his other hand to smooth down Lilah’s mussed hair. She’s still damp in her bathing suit and the hose is slowly gurgling a pool of mud around their feet, but Marty can’t find any good reason to let them go.

“Audrey’s gonna be pissed we didn’t get that on camera,” he says, laughing while Lilah reaches up to touch the side of his face. “I can’t hardly believe it.”

“I’d never seen the first steps—before,” Rust says, lashes casting low while he buries his gaze somewhere in the yard. But then he looks up again, eyes shining a little more than before, and with a heavy tug in his chest Marty knows just what he means.

“She did it, though,” he says, squeezing Rust’s arm. “For you.”

Rust doesn’t laugh but it’s a close thing, and the sound is so good Marty wants to hear it again and again. But the other man only leans forward and presses his nose against Lilah’s hair, closing his eyes for a brief moment while he draws in another breath.

“Don’t know about that,” he says softly, eyes finding Marty’s before looking up into the trees, letting mottled shapes of sunlight fall down through the branches like filigree lacework on his face. “I’m thinking it was for the both of us.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back with excess grandbaby fluff and enough tears to solve the California drought: rest assured, I have no shame.
> 
> I've been wanting to get into Maggie's head for a while and thought I'd take a stab at it here. I know not everybody agrees with her character or her character's decisions, but please cut me (and Miss Maggie) a small break for this chapter if you can. I enjoy her as a multifaceted and complex woman and hope some ounce of that came across through the writing.
> 
> There's a million housekeeping things I feel like I need to do and say for this fic and other projects, but hell if I can ever remember them all. Only two chapters left now, hoo boy. (I hope to finish by Christmas!) Even though we're winding down to the end here, I do want to preemptively let y'all know that there _WILL_ be a very small, 5/6-chapter spinoff written after this that takes place throughout several years in the future. And like all the shit I write, it'll end in redneck candyland, so don't worry: we just keep walking off into the sunset. 
> 
> If you haven't already, please go check out my other WIP that I'm writing with hartcohle, "Dear Rustin." And if you've noticed my icon change, the art is courtesy of a Halloween-themed piece @capturelifeoncanvas recently shared on her tumblr. It's BEYOND PRECIOUS, so go throw her some love if you can.
> 
> Thanks for keeping up with me, guys. <3 Until next time!


	33. rosewood

“My boy Shep and his pal Kurt Jennings spruced her up pretty good, just a few things needed fixin’ before we were road-ready,” Bobby says, cracking a sunflower seed between his molars before spitting the hull in the grass. “But I don’t think you’ll find a smoother ride for the price, considering the year on this thing.”

Marty walks down the paved path leading to the garage turned workshop, tucked off to one side of the house behind a blooming dogwood tree. Bobby’s old chocolate lab follows behind them with her tail wagging slow, collar tags jingling as she ambles along through the pink flowers wilting on the concrete.

“Can’t hardly believe you’re so eager to part with it for that much,” Marty says, hitching one thumb in his pocket as he watches Bobby bend to pull the garage door up. “Might as well be giving it away.”

The door rolls up with a clatter and Bobby fishes another few sunflower seeds out of his flannel pocket before walking inside and flicking on the overhead light. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” he laughs, throwing Marty a sidelong glance. “Just got things coming through here all the time, gotta make room for the next big project. Can’t have it sittin’ around gathering dust when it could be out on the road with a few more dollars put back in my pocket.”

“Oh, I ain’t complaining,” Marty says, following Bobby to the back corner of the shop. There’s a handful of sawdust under the workbench and he drags the toe of his boot through it, eyeballing the half-built child’s rocking chair laid out on display. “Just in constant awe of your generosity, man.”

An old flower-printed sheet likely repurposed from the missus’ linen closet is draped over something next to the bench and Bobby snorts while he grabs a handful and pulls it off in an easy kind of flourish. “Generosity my ass,” he stays, rolling up the sheet around one arm as he steps back next to Marty for a better look. “You’ll just owe me a couple more bottles of Macallan come Christmastime and then we’ll call it square.”

Marty lets out a low whistle and steps forward, reaching out to run a hand over the gas tank painted black and buffed to a high shine. “Even prettier than I thought,” he says, squatting down to look at the engine. “All compliments to your boy, this is some real fine work.”

Bobby smiles under his mustache and digs around in his jeans pocket before tossing Marty a single key attached to a white rabbit foot. “Help me wheel it out and you can take it for a little spin real quick.”

Back out in the driveway under the dogwood tree it takes a half-dozen kick starts before the motor cranks, but when it roars to life it mellows out into a rumbling purr.

“Shame the man of the hour couldn’t be here to take her home,” Bobby says, half-yelling over the exhaust. He tips his head to one side, reaching up to thumb around his mouth. “He—he ain’t set on avoiding me or nothing, is he?”

“Rust?” Marty asks, shaking his head as he swings a leg around to settle on the leather seat. “Nah—if Rust’s got a problem with somebody we both know he ain’t holding back on letting them know. He just had something to take care of this morning, is all.”  

“Huh, well good,” Bobby huffs before narrowing his eyes. “He even know you’re coming back with this thing?”

Marty grins like the devil as he revs the engine one time and nudges the kickstand back. “As far as I can tell,” he says, “he'll never see it coming.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“Mr. Cohle?” a woman in light blue scrubs says, swinging the door out into the waiting room as she tucks a chart under one arm. “If you’d follow me, please.”

Rust lets out a low breath and slowly stands, making brief eye contact with her from across the room before he nods once and watches the carpet under his feet. There’s only two other people left behind and he can feel their eyes on his back as he falls into step behind the younger woman and closes the door in his wake.

“Step up here on the scale for a moment,” she says in the corridor, already busy pushing the weight bar to the far right side on the level. “We’ll just get your current weight noted for the doctor.”

The scale balances at 186 with his boots on, and when Rust steps off the nurse flicks her eyes up as her pen keeps scribbling something on the chart. “About how tall are you?”

“’Bout six feet on the dot,” he says, folding his hands in front of him for lack of anything to do with them. Just standing here in this beige-washed sterile hallway has got him itching like hell for a cigarette, but then the nurse leads the way into a pale blue room, filled with soft light from the window in place of anything fluorescent.

The woman counts his pulse as she takes his blood pressure, eyes on her watch with two cold fingers at his wrist. Rust can feel the heartbeat in his arm, steady and strong, and counts along with her as he watches the wall clock spin around for a dozen seconds.

“120 over 80, right in the green,” she announces with a smile before jotting it on the chart. “Pretty good for a past smoker.”

Rust nods a little, idly wondering if he’s meant to smile back at her, and watches as she turns in the doorway and takes the knob in hand. “Just sit tight and the doctor will be here shortly.”

And then the door shuts, cutting out the rapid clack of computer keys and murmured conversation coming from the reception area down the hall. Rust settles back in the chair he’d dropped into and pushes his palms down his thighs, feeling the denim rasp under his fingers.

He’d come here on his own terms but still feels out of place, off-kilter, a little too aware that the only couple times he remembers going to a doctor inside the past fifteen years were courtesy of an ambulance ride to the nearest hospital. But all the usual trimmings are put out on the counter by the sink in glass jars like candy dishes, pulled from the pages of every childlike illustration he’d ever seen depicting a doctor’s office—cotton balls and swabs, tongue depressors, adhesive bandages, a box of latex gloves.

There’s a rubber reflex hammer laid out next to a long pair of tweezers still wrapped in sterile plastic and Rust can’t help but press his mouth into a thin line when he sees them.

Two raps on the door herald the newcomer and his eyes widen a little behind his glasses when he pokes his head into the room, standing up a bit straighter. “Mr. Cohle,” he says, shutting the door behind him. “I saw your name on the chart but couldn’t quite believe it until I saw you with my own two eyes.”

“Dr. Singh,” Rust says, moving to stand up and take the other man’s hand. Singh’s hands are warm and his grip is firm, shaking once before he steps back and drops onto a rolling stool by the sink to start flipping through the manila folder in his hand.

“Well, what brings you out here today?” he asks once he’s riffled through the paperwork and pulled a pen out of his breast pocket. “You look a bit—different, if I may, since the last time we crossed paths. Better, I’d say. I trust everything’s alright?”

“As far as I know,” Rust says, watching the bands of daylight slant in from between the open blinds, leaving white stripes across Singh’s khakis. He worries the hem of his shirt as he talks, clearing his throat a little. “Just thought I could do with a routine sort of visit, I suppose.”

“Mmhmm,” Singh hums, jotting something down with his pen. “I see you elected to cancel all of your follow-up appointments for the past two years,” he says before his dark eyes flick back up. “I’d say it’s a miracle we saw you long enough to get those sutures removed back in 2012.”

Rust doesn’t shift under the other man’s gaze but can’t quite meet his eye, focusing on the tiny gold sun pinned to his coat lapel. “Been to the doctor once since then, back in ’13. I reckon if there was anything wrong they’d have found it then.”

Singh taps his pen against something on the page. “A different surgeon, I see—the one who operated on your arm for the…ah yes, a humeral fracture. Sustained via close-range gunshot wound. ” He looks up this time and smiles. “An emergency room visit doesn’t count as a wellness check with your primary care physician, Mr. Cohle.”

“Well,” Rust says, words falling a little more softly than he’d intended. “I’m here now.”

“You are,” Singh says warmly, standing up and patting the paper-covered table. “Up here, please—you can keep your boots on if you’d like.”

Rust crosses the room and sits down on the edge of the examination table, the paper crinkling like dry firewood underneath him. Singh unloops his stethoscope from around his neck and puts the buds in his ears before reaching forward to listen to Rust’s heart.

“And to think I’m not even a primary care doctor,” he murmurs while he switches to Rust’s back and asks him to breathe deep. “But I’d be a fool for turning you away.”

He goes through a manner of routine things, checking the lymph nodes and reflexes, quickly shining a light in both Rust’s eyes and ears. Once he’s satisfied he steps back to give some room and makes a little gesture with his hand. “Lie back, if you don’t mind. Need to take a look at how that stomach of yours has been holding up.”

Rust maneuvers around until he’s on his back and staring at the whitewashed ceiling, trying hard not to count the measure of his breathing. He pulls his flannel up and untucks the undershirt beneath, drawing both back until the paler softness of his stomach is exposed.

Two warm hands touch down on it, and he marvels a little about how he’d know anywhere that they aren’t the ones he’s used to.

Singh follows the contour of the puckered scar with his eyes, busy gently pressing into Rust’s abdomen to feel for anything unusual or out of place. “Looks pretty good,” he says, moving to feel around the widest part near Rust’s navel while he compares against the older scars on his rib cage, ghosted there like three wilted star burns. “Were you using an ointment to help the scarring at any point?”   
  
“Yeah,” Rust says, thinking back to the white bottle on Marty’s bedside table, the stitches still itching in his skin and how Marty had flushed rosy when their lips brushed for the first time. “Some Vitamin E stuff, lotion that was prescribed to—my partner.”

“Ah yes.” Singh nods once and then gestures for Rust to sit back up and pull his shirt down. The doctor reseats himself on the rolling stool and picks up his pen again, eyes brightening some. “I remember Mr. Hart. I wasn’t his surgeon but I recall speaking to him once or twice in the hallway.”

Rust fixes the bottom button on his shirt before looking back up. There were too many days during that hospital visit that he can’t really account for, and he wants to ask but Singh is already flipping through paperwork again.

“I see you’re not so heavy on the smoking and drinking anymore,” he says, looking up from the chart above the rims of his glasses. “That’s good to hear.”

“Gave up the cigarettes for good about a month back,” Rust says, lids cast low. “Don’t drink so much anymore—maybe a few a week at the most. Try to keep it in better check.”

Singh pulls his glasses off his face and tucks them in his breast pocket, reaching up to rub the bridge of his nose. “I hope you don’t mind me being so frank, but the last time we took a look at your liver it was nearly neck-in-neck with your abdominal wound in terms of a mortality race. Didn’t look promising on that road, so I’m glad you’re doing better.”

“Had a few reasons to quit what I’d been doing,” Rust says, clearing his throat. “Necessary kind of changes.”

“I can understand that,” Singh says, considering Rust for a lingering moment. “Do you still live alone?”

“No,” Rust says, one work spoken low. He watches his boots where they dangle about a half-foot off the ground, the brown leather just now beginning to soften and wear in. They’re a bit nicer than his old black Cats, something worthy of more than just hiding behind a backcountry bar. “I live with my partner,” he says, looking up. “Marty.”

“Good, very good,” Singh says, shifting a little to the side on his stool as he peers at Rust’s chart again. “And he’s listed here as your—?”

“Emergency contact,” Rust says. “Primary.”

“Next of kin,” Singh says, slowly sounding out the words while he scribbles them on the page. He doesn’t say anything when he sees that _spouse_ had been quickly circled in lieu of _friend ._

Rust bites into his bottom lip as he looks back through the parted blinds into the little plot of yard outside the office. “Well, I don’t do much by way of some kind of—health regimen,” he says, fumbling a little around the last few words. “So if there’s anything I need to tend to, I trust you’ll let me know.”

Singh sets his pen back down and laces his fingers in his lap, giving a little shrug. “Not anything apparent that I can see,” he says. “Slight wheeze in your lungs at the top of each breath but that’s to be expected after smoking for thirty years. Heart sounds good, stomach looks a mess but seems to be holding up fine—everything right on par for a man your age. Really, I’m quite surprised to see you’re doing so well.”

He smiles then, raising his eyebrows a hair. “Maybe you could bottle and sell your secret.”

“Hmm,” Rust says, mouth tugging a little on one side for the first time since he walked in. “Maybe.”

Singh blows out a sigh before opening his hands in his lap so they face palm-up. “I’m not usually so forthcoming with my patients, Mr. Cohle, but considering your track record…well, I suppose you’d be a man who could stand to hear it. Would you allow me to be candid with you for a moment?”

“Go ahead,” Rust says, watching the other man closely.

The doctor nods and ponders his next words for a few seconds before he begins. “As a medical professional and a surgeon, I do everything in my power to help save a life when it’s placed into my hands—something generally accepted and taken for granted, yes? Because that’s what we’re trained and trusted to do.”

Rust inclines his head, still listening.

“The night you came in after you sustained that trauma to your arm and abdomen was no different. But considering the severity of the wound and how much blood you’d already lost—I have to admit, most of us in the room thought you were going to die on the table. There comes a point where you can—feel it, I suppose. A lack of presence, whether that presence is material or not.”  
  
“So it was touch and go for a while,” Singh continues with a small sigh, “and there was a point where I’d reconciled it to myself…well, I thought, this one probably isn’t going to make it. I remember thinking it clearly, as it turns out you can’t save them all.”

Quiet drifts for just a moment, long enough for the air conditioning unit to kick on outside and for Rust to flex his hands where they rest on his thighs. “Is there a particular reason you’re telling me this now?” he asks.

“Because you _lived_ _,_ ” Singh says. “And I’m not so much of a religious man myself these days—at least not in a sense the general population would recognize, but as far as I can tell, the fact that you made it out of that operating room is really nothing short of a miracle. The fact that you’re standing here today might be even more proof.”

“Don’t know if I’d call it that,” Rust says, bracing his hands on either side of the table so the paper crinkles underneath them. “More like the sheer luck of a final draw.”

“Maybe miracle isn’t the right word,” Singh admits, gathering up his chart and pen before gradually climbing to his feet. He moves toward the door and gestures for Rust to follow, slowly turning as they leave the blue room and break out into the empty hall. “But my diction choices aside, it seems to me like somebody was pulling pretty hard for you to stick around.”

“Come to think of it,” he says, guiding Rust toward the door at the far end of the hall, “I happen to know that for a fact.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


When Rust walks through the front door he finds Marty sitting at the kitchen counter with a glass of tea and a halved sandwich, idly poking through that morning’s newspaper even though the weather channel drones in the living room.

“How’d it go?” he asks, reaching down to mess with the cuff on his long-sleeved shirt where it’s gone half undone. “You make it out with a clean bill of health?”

“Seems so,” Rust says, walking around into the kitchen before setting a paper bag on the counter that looks like it was hand-stamped with _Junior’s Outdoor & Fishing Supplies_ _._ “Routine kinda thing.” He eyeballs Marty’s sandwich for a brief moment, prompting the other man to push the uneaten half across the counter on a paper towel.

“See you went shopping,” Marty says while Rust chews around a mouthful of turkey and swiss. “Christ, I keep forgetting to buy more fucking birdseed.”

Rust helps himself to a swig of Marty’s tea before producing two parcels from the bag. The first is a thick bundle of socks in woven blends of blue and grey, and the second he passes over still wrapped in a hard leather case about the length of Marty’s palm.

“What’s this here?” Marty asks, popping the metal snap on the case with his thumb.

“Passed by and thought I’d stop in to see what they had,” Rust says. “Found a few of the things you’ll be needing for the trip up north.”

Marty carefully tips the leather case so a heavy pocketknife falls into his hand, the hull of it a polished ivory color and engraved with three familiar initials.

“Bone?” he asks with a little smile, running his thumb over the carved letters.

“Elk antler,” Rust says sniffing some while he busies himself with unfolding and refolding the socks. “Just something good to keep on you while we’re up there. Never know when it might come in handy.”

Marty flips open the blade and holds it up so he can admire it in the light. “Real nice piece,” he says, carefully closing it again. “Don’t know how the hell we’ll get it through airport security, but thank you.”

“Socks are just standard fare for the winters up there,” Rust says, pushing a pair across the counter so Marty can feel the thick material. “Any man’s goddamn miserable without them. We can worry about picking up a half-decent coat and some boots later, I reckon.”

Marty nods and downs the rest of his tea glass before setting it back on the counter with a clink. He watches Rust for a moment and then spreads his palms out on the counter to drum his fingers there. “You ain’t been out in the garage yet, have you?”

“No,” Rust says around another bite of sandwich. “What for?”

Marty smiles and leans back on his stool, crossing both arms over his chest. “Turns out maybe I went out and picked up a little something, too. A surprise.”

Rust chews for a moment while his eyes narrow down. “A surprise,” he repeats, voice pitched careful.

“Uh-huh,” Marty says, gap between his teeth shining now. “I think you’ll like it—least I hope you will. Got it off Bobby Lutz for practically nothing, little something he’d been working on and looking to pass along. Won’t tell you the price because you won’t believe it when you see how pretty it is.”

Rust braces his hands on the edge of the counter and watches Marty from under heavy lids. It’s the same look that’d get any other pig in the box to sweat out all his secrets and squeal, but Marty tilts his chin up a little and doesn’t break.

“Well,” he says, still smiling. “You gonna go out there and look or not?”

Rust throws him a sidelong glance before he pushes off the counter and makes way for the laundry room, boots thudding slowly on the linoleum. He pauses at the door leading to the garage until he can feel Marty behind him and then twists the handle, stepping out into the darkened room that smells like damp paper and cool concrete.

It takes only a split second to find the new machine on the far side of the garage. Rust blinks and half-turns with his lips parted but Marty only hits the button so the garage door rolls up and lets the early afternoon sunlight in.

“So you can see it better,” he says a bit modestly, gesturing for Rust to keep walking over. “What do you think?”

The motorcycle isn’t a new model but it might as well be for how it shines in the light. Sleek black paint and chrome, a brand new leather seat. It sits low and Rust moves forward to touch a familiar emblem on the side and test the grips around the handlebars.

He smiles.

“This is what you were doing off at Bobby’s a few weeks back?” he asks, turning to glance at Marty before making a warm sort of noise in his chest. “Hmm.”

“We do a little more than trade fishing stories back and forth sometimes,” Marty says with a snort even though he’s near about wringing his hands. “Turns out I was up to no good myself while you were off in a tattoo parlor somewhere.”

Rust lets out an easy breath while he circles around the bike, sharp eyes picking out every little detail and angle. When he stops he hitches his hands up high on his hips and looks at where Marty’s still standing a few feet away.

“I haven’t talked to you about riding in years,” he says. “Thought you would’ve forgotten about that by now. Shit, I know I had.”

“You mentioned it in passing once or twice,” Marty says, giving a little shrug. “From when you were working—back in Texas, I reckon.” He laughs a little and reaches up to palm the back of his neck. “Not anything you’d have forgotten how to do in the meantime, right?”

Marty walks over then, and before he can say anything else Rust snags the hem of his shirt and pulls him in close real quick, just long enough to plant a kiss on the corner of the mouth.

“Course I haven’t forgotten,” he says, still holding onto Marty’s shirt while they stand close. “Don’t have a license to ride anymore, but—thank you, Marty.”

Marty grins out and out and bites into his lip, reaching down to dig something out of his pocket. “Well here,” he says, producing a pair of keys on a chrome ring before dropping them into Rust’s hand. “She’s all yours.”

Rust presses the keys into his hands and steps back, watching Marty in that way that makes the other man’s skin feel warm and pink. He bounces the ring on his middle finger and then kicks the stand up on the bike before steering it back out into the driveway.

“Got a full tank of gas,” Marty says, stepping out into the afternoon. “You can take it out right now, it’s ready to roll.”

Rust puts the kickstand back down and then straightens up, squinting in the sun. “Go ahead and close up the house,” he says.

“What for?”

“We’re going for a ride.”

Marty lets out a harsh laugh and reaches up to scratch through the grey whiskers along his jaw. “You think for one cotton-picking second that I’m gonna sit on the back of that thing with you?” He twists his mouth up into a wry kind of smile and then puts his hands back in his pockets. “Maybe need to go back to the doc and get your head checked.”

“You want me to get you a sissy bar?” Rust asks. “You ain’t gonna fall off.”

“Fuck you,” Marty laughs, “you know what I mean. Imagine if somebody from the old bullpen saw us cruising down the road? I don’t even wanna think about that getting around, much less see it happen.”

“Well fuck them,” Rust says, shifting his weight over onto one hip while he works his jaw. “You figure I care what they think?”

“No, I know _you_ don’t,” Marty says, blowing out a long sigh before he throws out a hand toward the bike. “You ain’t even taken it for a practice run around the damn block yet. Don’t need me on there weighing it down.”

They watch one another for a moment, neither man dropping his eyes or backing down. “Marty,” Rust finally says. “You trust me?”

Marty’s eyes cut to the side, then. “You already know the answer to that.”

“Then close up the house and c’mon,” Rust says. “We’ll take a back road, scenic route—don’t gotta roll down the main fucking drag.”

“You really want me to go?” Marty asks, shaking his head as he takes in the picture of Rust standing in the driveway next to the motorcycle. They’re both buttoned up in jeans and flannel, the air just now gone cool enough to be bearable during the afternoon. Rust’s hair ruffles in the breeze, line of his mouth pulled into a stern kind of bow.

“If I didn’t I wouldn’t be standing here askin’,” he says.

Marty goes back in to get his phone off the counter and check the front lock. He hits the garage door button in the Cadillac and then stands next to where Rust’s already sitting astride the bike until it goes down.

“You got any idea where we’re going?”

“Nope,” Rust says, and then takes two kicks to crank the engine.

“Well, what the hell,” Marty sighs, bracing a hand on Rust’s shoulder as he swings a leg around to sit on the back. “Here goes nothing.”

“You’d better hold on,” Rust says over his shoulder before he nudges the stand back. “I’d say your ass is worth a little more than anybody’s pride.”

Marty lets out a low swear and tries to bite the grin off his mouth as he gets his hands around Rust’s sides. “I’ll keep that one in mind for the next time I’ve got you flat on your back in the bedroom,” he says, words not carrying on the air because Rust has already put the bike in gear and brought it roaring back to life.

They coast out of the driveway and down the neighborhood street, and then Rust turns left out on the back highway and steers down the open road.  
  


* * *  
  


The thicker the trees grow on either side of the road the looser Marty gets in the seat, threading his fingers together across the front of Rust’s stomach when they pass a dairy farm on the left and the engine lets out over a long stretch of flat highway.

It’s shady out here on the backroads and the old oaks have been growing for so long they bend over the cracked ribbon of asphalt like worshippers curved in supplication. Marty watches them pass from above as Rust kicks the engine up a gear, and if he revels a little too much in the warmth bleeding into his chest, no one’s here to stop him.

Rust doesn’t talk but he rests one hand on Marty’s for a second, a brief touch come and gone like a bird in flight. A few more miles down the road with nothing but a straight shot ahead of them, this time he leaves it there for a little longer.

They only pass two cars in more than twice as many miles and at the next bend in the road Marty starts feeling like he’s stepped into an old dream, all familiar feelings and foreign places, watching the world pass in a blur before he recognizes the old metal bridge ahead of them.

He glances down at his watch and they’ve been riding east for coming up on something like forty minutes. The time slipped by in a mirage and suddenly he knows where they are, knows it even though he hasn’t been down this road in nearly six years.

“Hey,” he says, leaning close enough that his mouth is lined up with Rust’s left ear. “Take a right up here, second road after the bridge.”

Rust nods and starts slowing down so they coast over the old bridge, passing by a crooked street sign that reads _Twilight_ until they come up on Rosewood Lane. The squat little sign sitting in a bed of greenery heralds that they’re about to turn into Rosewood Lutheran Cemetery. Further down the road above the tree line, a telltale steeple points a white cross up into the afternoon sky.

He guides the motorcycle onto the main road and keeps driving ahead at a slow rumble, and Marty doesn’t signal anything different until they’re presented with a fork on either side of a mausoleum and he touches Rust’s arm to turn right.

Rust hasn’t set foot in a graveyard in a good long while, and only ever for one pale marble gravestone he left behind in Houston. But he has no ties left here, no carved names tugging him along, so when Marty signals for them to slow he coasts to a stop and kills the engine. He doesn’t move until Marty swings off behind him and stretches until his lower back pops, wincing a little as he tests his bad knee on the gravel path leading across the yard full of grave plots.

“It just now occurred to me as we were passing through,” he starts, wetting his bottom lip as he squints off into the distance at a group of white stone mausoleums, guarded by a pair of curly-maned lions spotted with green lichen. “Well, I just now realized that you never did get to meet my old man.”

Rust kicks the stand down and gets off the bike, leaving it there on the side of the lane as he moves closer to Marty’s side. “I didn’t,” he says, looking across the yard of carved stones and statues like he might be able to pick the man in question out on sight. “Eric, you said his name was.”

“Eric Rutherford Hart,” Marty says with a nod, turning to start crunching through the gravel. “He’ll be back this way.”

Marty’s quiet for a moment before he sighs a little, passing a tiny stone marked with a child-sized blue wreath as they move further along the path. “Mom now, too. Still forget sometimes.”

There are several stones in the Hart plot but the two closest ones are laid side by side with the sun glinting off them, dark marble veined with white whorls of color. No flowers to speak of in the carved vases, but somebody had stuck a little American flag into the earth next to Eric’s marker. It looks new enough that it isn’t sun-faded like so many of the satin flowers they’ve passed, and Rust catches Marty watching it waver in the soft breeze before looking away.

“Church must’ve put it there,” he mumbles, mouth briefly pressing into a thin line. “Veteran’s Day, probably, since he fought in Korea.”

Rust nods and then takes a step back, crunching through the gravel to wander further off down the lane. “Give you a minute,” he says with a passing hand on Marty’s elbow, and the other man watches him go but doesn’t ask him to stay.

The cemetery is neatly tended in most spots but some graves look wilder than others, overgrown with grass, the weatherworn stones mottled over with dirt and pollen. Rust doesn’t stray far but strolls along as he watches the tiny graveyard finches flit about, raising up a fuss and taking to the air when a blue jay screams and lands on the plot below a sleepy angel to peck around in the grass.

It doesn’t stay long, craning around to ruffle a beak under its wing, and when Rust is a yard or two away it takes flight again and disappears beyond the distant mausoleums. Standing at the feet of the oxidized angel, he bends and picks up what the bird had left behind before moving on, idly twisting the blue feather between two fingers.

He can’t help but think about Sophia. Part of him used to reconcile that a tiny plot wedged into the ground in Texas was the only place he’d ever be able to see her again, that her name carved in the white marble was all he’d had left to touch outside the few things he’d allowed himself to hide away in a shoebox.

Standing here on top of a thousand remnants of what he used to believe was finite death, part of Rust knows that isn’t the case anymore. Knows, because he felt her, that she’d be waiting for him somewhere else.

He’s letting the sun shine warm on his back when he looks up and finds Marty peering back at him.

Back on the Hart plot Rust comes to a stop by Marty’s side, just at the foot of the newer stone on the right. He squints at the carved name and dates, learning that Deidre Mayfield Hart only passed on in the spring of 2009, late in the heart of April.

“Think you met her once,” Marty murmurs, looking across the cemetery instead of at his mother’s headstone. “She was on her way out the door on a Sunday night when you came to drop something off at the house.”

Rust doesn’t remember her face but he can recall the powdered softness of her hand in his, how meeting her eyes felt like looking into somebody else’s he knew. He’d forgotten that memory until this moment, and the whiff of Yardley Lavender in his nose doesn’t seem plausible on the early-autumn wind but it’s there all the same.

“I know they can’t really—hear me,” Marty says, hands fidgeting some with the hem of his flannel. “But the last time I came here was a few days before we broke you outta the hospital, round two years ago now. Had us a little visit.”

He pauses to suck in a deep breath and blow it back out again. “And a…whole lot has changed, since then,” he says after a moment, looking up at Rust with a small smile. “So it’d only be fitting to do formal introductions now, I reckon.”

Rust raises his brows a little, glancing down at his boots before he catches the corner of Marty’s eye. “Not sure I’m anybody they might’ve been expectin’.”

“I don’t know about that,” Marty says, one dimple deepening under his eye. “I might’ve sent word along.”

He fumbles for a moment, trying to mouth the words even though they don’t come, and doesn’t seem to find them until he feels two fingers brush the back of his own where he’d left one hand hanging at his side.

“This is—this is Rust,” he says, clearing his throat some. “Never met him, Dad, but I think you’d liked to have known him.” Marty laughs and squeezes Rust’s fingers into his hand. “He’s a far cry better soldier than I ever was cut out to be, I can tell you that much.”

Rust doesn’t say anything, eyes cast easy on the side of Marty’s face while the afternoon lulls around them.

“Anyhow,” Marty keeps on, flustered just enough that he’s gone pinker in the cheeks despite the cool wind. “He means a whole lot to me, and I just…thought, maybe, that you ought to know that.”

The jay calls from the treetops again and Marty shakes his head, looking around like he might’ve forgotten something. “Shit,” he laughs a little breathlessly, “didn’t even think to bring flowers or nothing.”

Rust looks down at his right hand and finds the flight feather still there. He twirls it between his fingertips one last time before stepping forward and leaving it on the edge of Deidre’s headstone, letting it catch and shine blue in the sunlight.

“They’d be proud of you, Marty,” he says, quiet. “Don’t doubt that.”

“Well, maybe for some parts more than others,” Marty says a bit gruffly, looking at the jay’s feather even though he doesn’t reach out to move it. “But I reckon this last part looks a little better than the rest.”

Rust hums softly but doesn’t press any further, the two of them turning in even time to start making for the gravel lane again. The bike still sits off on the road, waiting for them to slowly make their way back. He feels Marty close beside him and thinks how strange it is, to walk out of a cemetery feeling a little richer than when he walked in.

When he touches his hands down on the warm metal he swings back on, waiting for a murmured complaint from Marty that doesn’t come. He feels the other man settle back in behind him, one foot hitched up on the spoke in the back while he waits for Rust to crank the engine.

“What?” Marty murmurs, eyes on the fine hair at the base of Rust’s neck.   

“Just thinking,” Rust says, pulling the keys out of his shirt pocket, a matched pair in the palm of his hand. “Next time I drive out to Houston, I’d like for you to come along.”

Rust only has one knot left tied in Texas and Marty knows who it is without having to ask. He leaves his other foot on the ground to help keep them balanced but rests both his hands on Rust’s sides, solid and warm and familiar underneath.

“We can do that,” he says, shifting his fingers to thread around Rust’s stomach again as he watches him bow his head to start the engine. “I’d like that a lot.”

Rosewood is empty save for the two of them, and even if it wasn’t Marty doesn’t think he’d be apt to give up his grip on Rust. He’s too damn old and rickety to be perched on the back of a motorcycle but he doesn’t mind, at least not really, and when the bike starts up he holds on a little tighter to the man in front of him.

Not because he needs to, he thinks.

Because he wants to.

 

   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time you see me here, we'll be parting ways at the end of a long journey. Not forever, of course, but isn't that strange to think about? As of yesterday I've been writing this story for 20 months; if it were a kid it'd be up and walking and talking on its own by now. (And Lord, how I hope I've raised a good one.)
> 
> Welp, you know the drill: only one more update left to go! I'd ideally like to have it up by Christmas or somewhere thereabout, but I can't make any surefire promises just yet...as you might understand, finally ending something that has meant so much to me for so long could take more time and thought than I'd originally anticipated. I just sincerely hope y'all enjoy where the story ends, and that some of you from the beginning are still around to see it. 
> 
> Until we meet again! Have a Happy Thanksgiving. xx


	34. alaska ||part one||

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning, this is only one part of the finale and the other half will be posted at a later date. If you'd like to wait for the last installment to read the journey in full, please feel free to skip over this portion in the meantime. Thanks for understanding!

  
  
The last few slivers of daylight stripe across the bedroom walls, as real as golden piano keys made playable to the touch. Rust watches them waver as the blinds gently move in the windowsill, letting his eyes and thoughts drift while he listens to rustling fabric and the pull of zippers nearby.

If there were ever a sense of restless ease, he figures it’s paying him a visit tonight. Not anything strong enough to make his jaw twitch or his pulse flutter high in his throat, but enough that he’s got to try and keep it quelled under the drape of softer things, and that decision finds him sprawled out on Marty’s side of the unmade bed while the other man takes stock of their open suitcases.

He’s been watching Marty’s hands while they work, and that always did something to help smooth some of the strain out of his mind.

“Refolding everything I’ve already put in there ain’t gonna make that big a difference,” Rust says, hissing around a small stretch that hitches tight in his lower back. The muscle loosens up and he shifts over on his side to pull both knees up, eyeing the way Marty has folded and rolled most of his undershirts like little cotton sleeping bags. “You must’ve been watching the home and garden channel again.”

“The hell are you talking about?” Marty murmurs, though he gives up on messing with the undershirts and pulls out a flannel button-down to shake open the sleeves. “We’re gonna be gone for nigh on a week and you’ve hardly got anything in here.”

Rust drags a palm across the sheets and shrugs as best he can from where he’s lying in bed, something he pulls off more with an expression than any real movement of his shoulders. “I’ve packed less for a lot longer.”

Marty cuts his eyes over and lets out a short laugh, carefully folding the blue flannel in half before rolling it up into another bundle. “Well this ain’t a solo shot down to Tijuana on a wild man’s errand, lone star. I’m packing what I need and whatever the fuck it is I know you’re gonna forget to bring.”

“Like these,” he says a second later, tossing a pair of long john underwear across the bed so they land on Rust’s hip. “So you don’t freeze your ass off, much as you complain about being cold.”

Rust blinks and picks the long johns up, briefly fingering the soft ivory material before pitching them over to land in Marty’s open suitcase. “What all have you got in there?” he asks, tucking a hand behind his head.

“Got you a sweater the other day,” Marty mumbles, poking something that looks like knit wool dyed a dark blue. “Since a man can’t survive in flannel alone. Figured you could wear it under your coat to keep warm.”

“Mmm, that’d be nice,” Rust hums, eyes roving over the folded bundles still laid out on the bed. “What about that grey thing?”

Marty picks up the grey thing in question and narrows his eyes over a growing smile while he unfolds it to reveal a knit cap. “A hat,” he snorts, tugging it on over his ears while a touch of something rosy burns high in his cheeks. “Since you apparently ain’t ever seen one before, and not all of us are so blessed to still have a full head of hair.”

“Didn’t say nothin’ about it,” Rust says, quiet, feeling warmth gather like rainwater in his stomach while he watches Marty fidget and then finally catch his eye. “Looks real cute, though.”

Marty lets out a low swear at that, reddening even deeper while he yanks the cap off and tosses it at Rust’s head. “ _Cute_ ,” he sputters, like that’s somehow dirtier a word than the one he just graced the bedroom with, and then busies himself with throwing things back into his suitcase. “I’ll have to show you what’s cute sometime, slick. Better be glad we got shit to do.”

“Guess I’ll take a rain check, then,” Rust drawls, content enough now to let his eyes slip shut when Marty starts whistling a familiar tune that cocoons and wraps around him, mixing in with the waning sunlight like gauzy wings.

Somewhere in the back of his mind he marvels a little at this moment as it unfolds around them without limit, the picture of two figures standing on the seam between a long road already traveled and the one that stretches further ahead. But that restless warmth is kicking like a wild rabbit behind his ribs again and it takes Rust a moment to get a finger on what it is—not itching nerves, he decides, without the telltale thump of a pulse in his neck and raw buzzing in his fingertips.

And if the truth is anything worth trusting, he knows this: they’re leaving for Alaska in the morning, those two figures, rising in tandem before the sun even stretches to strike out on a journey that’ll lead them further north, down a road that one man has only ever traveled alone and the other’s never been.

There’s a particular kind of thrill in all that, Rust thinks. Having already met and mapped out the stars so he can show them to someone else along the way.  
  


* * *  
  


Marty is pacing around the kitchen even though he’d sooner spit than call it that, caught up in the soft shuffle of his own house shoes against cool tile. He touches a small stack of printouts on the counter as if to straighten them, checks them one more time and then again for good measure before setting his wallet and keys on top like needless paperweights.

The shower starts up down the hall and he gnaws into his lip while water runs steady, eyeballing the weather report where it’s humming on the television across the living room. Three weeks into October finds Louisiana gone cool enough to start wearing a jacket again, but the report Rust read coming down from Juneau had the city stuck at a high just a few degrees above freezing.

Marty sighs against the inevitable cold waiting for them and pads across the living room to drop down in his empty recliner. The cat is curled up in one corner of the sofa and he nudges the TV remote away from her head before flipping through a handful of channels, trying to find the familiar face of some old movie he’s seen a hundred times before.

Two minutes into a rerun of _Cool Hand Luke_ that he could recite backwards and forwards in his sleep, the distraction he was looking for comes in the form of Maggie Sawyer’s name flashing on the incoming call screen of his cell phone.

A crease pulls between Marty’s brows but he brings the phone up to his ear anyhow, busy fiddling with the volume buttons in the other hand. “Hey, Mags,” he says, an old echo that sneaks out of his mouth before he can stop it, and when the TV’s close to silent Maggie lets out an easy breath on the other end of the line.

“Marty,” she says, one word said in plain greeting before she seems to remember the rest. “How—how are you? I hope it isn’t a bad time to call.”

“Nope, it’s all quiet here,” Marty says, reaching down to pull the lever on his recliner until both feet are propped up in front of him, just as a shackled Paul Newman crumples and falls into the dirt on the television screen. “Is everything alright? Seems a little late for you to be making a social call.”

A familiar snort of laughter bursts in his ear. “My God,” Maggie says, “you’re starting to sound just like Rust.”

“Well,” Marty murmurs, clearing his throat a bit. “You know what they say about old m—uh.”

His voice cuts in two before he can finish and the unspoken word weighs like a lead sinker in his craw, hopefully far enough down that Maggie can’t hear its faint echo there.

“What do they say?” she asks a moment later, voice light as a silver bell, and Marty knows right then she could always read him whether the print was on the page or not.

“Uh, well, nothin’ too special,” he says, trying and failing to shake the telltale bluster out of his tone. “You know, working men answer the same toll and all—get on a wavelength.”

Maggie’s knowing little smile is palpable across the line. “I see,” she says, pausing long enough for Marty to start fidgeting in his seat. “So, where’s your other half tonight?”

“He should be in the shower,” Marty says, plucking idly at the arm rest cover while a flush scorches his ears like fire, and then nearly jumps clean out of his skin when he feels warm fingers brush against the back of his neck.  
  
“Not anymore,” Rust says, walking around the coffee table to pick up the cat before sinking down in her place with an armful of calico curled into his lap.

“Speak of the devil, he’s right here,” Marty halfway croaks, catching the other man’s eye before he silently mouths _Maggie_ with his hand over the receiver. Rust only raises his eyebrows a hair and blinks before turning his attention to Ghost, softly scratching around her ears and collar until she starts to purr.

“I might as well come out and say it,” Maggie sighs, quieter than before. “Audrey told me about this big trip you two have got planned a few nights ago. You could’ve said something, you know—to me.”

Marty breathes out a whisper of air between parted lips, rolling that over in his mind like an unfamiliar stone. “Well,” he says. “I don’t guess I thought you’d take much interest in hearing about it. Figured the girls would let you know everything worth telling.”

“They would’ve,” Maggie says after a moment, words hanging stranded and off-kilter between them before she tries for something else. “Alaska’s a long way to go, Marty.”

And to Marty this conversation feels like something wedged between waking and a dream, with Maggie on one far end and Rust waiting on the other. He feels bookended, sometimes, as if he’s only ever been kept upright between the two of them throughout his life, ten long years notwithstanding. Pillars to hold onto, and he only ever crumbled when they fell away.

“It is,” Marty says, and can’t help it when his eyes slide over to find Rust. “But you know I’m not going up there alone.”

Rust glances up at him with sleepy eyes, still somehow lit with a spark of the brightness and resolve always running in a silver current behind them. A look Marty’s seen a thousand and one times over the top of a state-issued desk and across the cab of an old Honda, through the rising steam of shitty gas station coffee and above the filled pages of a ledger. And then, a long time later, over bacon and eggs slathered with too much cheap hot sauce, watching him during all the best commercials in the Super Bowl, pillowed under the softness of early morning when he opened his eyes to find two dark blue ones looking back.

“I know you aren’t,” Maggie says, drawing him away again from the edges of what felt like a trance. “But I just—well, I just wanted to call, you know. Before you left.”

Marty slowly realizes she’s gone and left a handful of words for him to fish out of the well like hard-won pennies. “Is there somethin’ in particular you wanted to run by me?” he asks, not unkindly.

Maggie sighs again, long and low like he remembers her doing in their bedroom and kitchen two lifetimes ago, on nights he'd finally won her over in the midst of rougher words. “Just to be careful,” she says. “And to enjoy your trip.”

“Thanks,” Marty says, throat bobbing a little in place. “I appreciate that.”  

Her voice rushes back in again without warning, sounding more abrupt than she’d meant. “What have you two got planned?”

“Not too sure yet,” Marty says, trying to decipher the planes of Rust’s unreadable face as if he’d somehow heard. “He’s been keeping most things a secret, I reckon.”

Rust’s eyes flick back over, then, to offer up the barest brush of a wink that anybody else might miss if they weren’t looking for it.

“Hmm,” Maggie hums, tapping a nail against her phone so it briefly clicks in his ear. “You know where you’re staying?”

“Something he’s got squared away with an old tie up there,” Marty says, still curious himself about the calls Rust had made from the back patio a few weeks back. “We’ll be visiting in the off-season, so as I hear it there’s an empty fishing cabin with our name on it for the week.”

“Well, it sounds like you’ll probably be getting the real deal out of it,” Maggie says, a little thread of warmth bleeding through her voice again. “The full Alaskan package from the man himself.”

It tickles him, somehow, hearing her talk like that. Like he hasn’t heard in a long time.

“Yeah,” Marty says, biting into his own grin. “I wouldn’t be expecting anything less.”

And then the tilt of her voice changes, no less soft but with a hint of something different. “Do you mind handing the phone to Rust for a second?”

She bids him a good night, and when Marty passes the phone over Rust only holds out an open hand to take it.

“Miss Maggie,” he says, waiting for her voice with his eyes hidden under the weight of his lashes.

“You don’t have to call me that,” Maggie says without greeting, hiding any fluster behind her familiar scoff. “How are you?”

“Fine as can be,” Rust says, slowly pushing his fingers through Ghost’s fur while Marty pretends to watch his western nearby. “And you?”

“No complaints,” she says, and he can nearly see her perched at her kitchen island with a halfway finished glass of wine, looking at the platinum-set diamond on her left hand where it clinks against grey marble.

“Listen, Rust—”

A few beats pass between them. He listens to something briefly brush over the receiver, likely her hair as she moves to tuck it behind one ear. “I’m here,” he says.

“I know you’re probably the last person on earth I need to say this to,” Maggie finally says, drawing in a quiet breath. “But—do me a favor, please, and…take care of him while you’re up there.”

“Hadn’t planned on anything different,” Rust says, vaguely wondering if she could ever know the full extent of what he really means when he says it. “You know I will.”

“I—I do,” Maggie says, letting out an airy little laugh. “Thank you. And I—I’ll let you go for now, alright? You two take care of yourselves.”

“We will,” Rust says, and then listens to the dial tone kick back in when she ends the call.

“Wonder what that was all about,” Marty says as he reaches out to take the phone Rust passes over, their hands brushing together in a pool of amber lamplight. “She sound off to you?”

“Naw,” Rust says, settling back against the couch. “Just wanted to wish us well, is all.”

Marty rubs a hand over his eyes and snorts, mashing the volume button on the remote until they can hear Newman’s voice again. “Could’ve done it on speakerphone, then.”

Rust feels the corner of his mouth pull up when he looks over at him. “Probably,” he says, and then doesn’t say that Maggie knows, too, that he’s the one person who could ever protect Marty Hart.

  
  
  
  


The clock is edging on eleven when they finally head for bed, one man slowly meandering in after the other. Marty is busy pulling the comforter down to the foot of the mattress when Rust pads in and sets his silent cell down on the dresser, moving around the packed suitcases left waiting by the door.

He’s wearing a pair of Marty’s boxers and an old t-shirt and pulls the latter over his head, folding it one time over his arm before dropping it on the chest at the foot of their bed. Marty sinks down on the edge of the mattress before rummaging around in his bedside drawer, shuffling through a handful of cough drops and a little pack of tissues before he finds what he was looking for.

Rust folds himself under the sheets and watches the other man’s back as he uncaps a tube of muscle liniment, filling the room with the heady smell of menthol and lavender. Marty hisses a little as he stretches his bad knee out with a low creak, rubbing the ointment into the lightly freckled skin there with his fingertips.

“Hurts a little more in this cooler weather,” he murmurs, pressing a thumb into the oblong scar on his kneecap before wrinkling his forehead. “Wondering how it’ll do when we get up north.”

Rust stays quiet as he shifts his legs under the covers, letting the minty smell of liniment burn clean in his nose. He watches as Marty closes the nightstand drawer again and twists the lamp off before tucking himself into bed, wordlessly scooting closer to Rust until their knees brush together.

Marty’s body shudders with a chill before he pulls the sheet and their blue blanket up over his shoulders. The ceiling fan is still running on high but neither man has ever been able to sleep soundly without it no matter how cold the room is around them.

It’s quiet for a spell and then Rust moves closer, pushing one of his knees forward until it’s tucked between Marty’s thighs. “You nervous?” he asks, letting the words fall halfway into his pillow, gone soft and pliable there.

“Me?” Marty asks, like there might be somebody else in the room with them, and then lets out a soft _hoo_ that Rust feels tickle somewhere along his temple. “Maybe, just a little bit. Are you?”

“Not really,” Rust says, even though the roar of an airplane engine has been ringing in the back of his head on and off for most of the day. “I’ve made the trip often enough.”

“Reckon that’s true,” Marty chuckles, sniffing some in the darkness folded around them. He thinks about the implications of that and doesn’t want to dig into them any further, at least not tonight, though he briefly ponders the difference between the route Rust is taking tomorrow and all the ones that came before it.

“Kinda strange,” Marty says after a moment, quiet, feeling too much like a little boy at a sleepover. “This is the last time we’ll be sleeping in our bed for a week.”

Rust hums in his chest, still listening to Marty even though his eyes have slipped shut. “You gonna miss something in particular about it?”

“Maybe,” Marty says, reaching over to tuck an arm around Rust’s middle. “It’s _ours_ , after all.”

“Hmm,” Rust says, feeling familiar fingers idly trace across his bare back. “Guess in my mind, any damn bed with the both of us in it counts as ours.”

“Is that so?” Marty answers with a touch of something new in his voice, hand moving down further until his fingers sneak under the waistband of Rust’s boxers, pressed flush against the warm skin there. “I like the way you think.”

“I bet you do,” Rust says through a wide yawn, pressing his cold toes against Marty’s calves. “Don’t be getting any ideas. We gotta be at Shelley’s place at seven-thirty in the fuckin’ morning.”

“Since when have you ever been one to back down from a challenge?”

Rust makes a rough sound somewhere low in his chest. “If you’re hot in the saddle to bottom out and be the one strapped into a fucking airplane seat for most of tomorrow, be my guest.”

Marty laughs like he’s halfway scandalized but promptly deflates a little, drawing his hand up to the small of Rust’s back in a truce. “You drive a hard bargain, baby.”

“No,” Rust says with a hint of smile cutting through his voice, just enough to give him away. “I just put shit into perspective.”

“That’s always been my job, I thought.”

“Mmhmm.”

A little trill sounds from the doorway and neither man can see her through the dark, but they both feel her light paws padding across the comforter until she’s curled up somewhere near Rust’s hip, nose buried underneath her tail.

“So this cabin we’re staying in,” Marty murmurs around a yawn of his own a few easy moments later, feeling Rust’s arm tuck up between them. “You know much of anything about where it is, what it looks like?”

“Not a whole lot,” Rust says, feeling himself start to drift off under the spell of sleep, listening to Marty’s steady and familiar breathing, then the soft scratch of his whiskers on the pillow. “But so long as we’re up there, it’ll be ours.”  
  


* * *  
  
  


October light fills the house early the next morning, pale grey slanting in through the windows and sliding door like thin veils of muslin.  
  
Marty walks through the house in his socks, mostly dressed save for his shoes dangling from two fingers at his side. Their bags are in the kitchen now and he keeps bumping into an old feeling hiding in corners of the bedroom, the same one that follows him out to drape across the stillness of the living room in familiar shadows. Something like the ring of nostalgia, and he can’t quite place the thought until he’s sitting on the edge of the recliner, pulling on his shoes one at a time while the coffee pot finishes the last brew it’ll churn out for the next week.

He remembers being a boy, two and three and maybe even four lifetimes ago, waiting for his father to come down the hallway with the Buick keys in hand. There was always somewhere to be headed on early mornings like this, where he was still rubbing sleep from his eyes but filled with too much excitement to think of crawling back into his unmade bed. The fishing camp down south, old Cecil Clyatt’s horse ranch just a hair past the Texas line—places new and untouched by the soles of his shoes, waiting to be discovered.

Marty realizes he hasn’t been filled with this much anticipation in years, standing here on the cusp of a new journey unraveling ahead of them. At least not any of this sort, boiled back down to the pure feeling pulled up from the wilder garden of his childhood. He ponders how all this time with Rust has been one new first after another, filling up two years of his life with more adventure than he’d ever had in ten.

And maybe it’s been gifted time, he sometimes thinks without dwelling too long on what that really means. Time for the both of them.

“You alright?” Rust’s voice comes from the kitchen, and Marty realizes he hadn’t even heard the quiet footfalls of the other man’s boots walking in. “Been sitting there with your shoe in one hand for as long as I’ve been out here.”

When Marty looks up Rust has a cup of coffee in front of his face, one hip canted against the countertop while steam curls in the air. His shirtsleeves are rolled up to his elbows, and Marty’s so used to seeing that old black bird he figures it doesn’t even register in his mind as a tattoo anymore, more like a birthmark Rust was wearing when he stepped through CID’s door twenty years ago and into his life.

“Uh, yeah,” Marty says when his eyes refocus, sniffing as he quickly looks down to finish putting his left shoe on. “You about ready to head out?”

“Mmhmm,” Rust says, taking a deep swig of coffee before setting his cup down with a soft _clink_. “We gotta catch the cat real quick. She ain’t gonna like it.”  
  
“Me either,” Marty sighs, smoothing both hands down his thighs before standing up. His mind quickly wanders back to earlier in the summer when they’d had to run out into the middle of a damned hurricane to fetch and bundle her back inside. “Maybe you ought to put her in a pillowcase or something for the ride over to Shelley’s, keep her from spookin’.”

“Naw, she don’t need none of that,” Rust says, disappearing into the laundry room adjacent to the kitchen so his voice drifts back down the hall. “Pop used to kill mink and marten that way, throw a sack over it and club it to death. One hit to the head was all it took.”

Marty blinks to himself and listens to the silence that comes after that. “Christ above,” he whispers in vain, and then watches as Rust walks back in with a towel and the same cardboard carrier the animal shelter had given them the day they brought Ghost home.

“As it stands, I can’t say I’m too keen on any pillowcase,” Rust murmurs, setting the carrier down before opening it up and dropping a plastic bag full of kibble inside. The folded towel goes in after it, and then he seals up the box before letting out a low whistle that echoes across the house.

“You ain’t putting her in there?” Marty asks, scoffing when Rust levels him with a blank look. The tinkle of a familiar bell sounds from down the hall and he feels his face screw up. “What the hell is that towel for?”

Rust waits until Ghost pads into the room with her tail held aloft, trilling and hopping up on the barstool when he drums a few fingers on the counter. “Familiar smell,” he says, scratching around her ears one time before picking up his coffee mug again to polish off the rest. “Helps them settle down in strange surroundings.”

And two years ago Marty would’ve had some shit to say about all that, no small sliver of doubt, but here and now all he does is walk past Rust into the kitchen to rinse his own empty mug and turn it over so it rests in the sink. He looks down at it for a long moment, waiting until Rust’s joins it a second later.

“Just leave them here for now,” Marty says, looking at the fraternal twin cups nudged beside one another. “They’ll be here when we get back.”

Rust is close enough at his side that warmth bleeds through the layers of cotton and flannel between them. “You’re making that sound like a promise,” he says, feeling Marty’s fingers snake up beneath the tail of his shirt.

“Oh, it is,” Marty says, splaying his hand wide where it rests against Rust’s lower back. “Just in case you get any wild ideas while we’re up there.”

And Rust smiles at that, tucking in close against Marty’s side so they’re standing pressed together in front of the kitchen window. “I got a few up my sleeve,” he says, leaning in to press a chaste kiss above the whiskers on Marty’s cheek before straightening up some. “Nothing you gotta be worryin’ about, though.”

“Good,” Marty says a bit gruffly, cutting his narrowed eyes over to Rust. “Otherwise I’d have to knock you over the head like one of them minks and drag your ass back home.”

“Hmm,” Rust hums in his chest, lashes cast heavy enough to hide his eyes in the rising daylight. “Didn’t realize I was such a pretty dime in your pocket.”

Marty lets out a low laugh and drags his hand around to Rust’s hip. “Probably couldn’t get much for you in this market,” he says, popping Rust once before nudging them back into motion. “Figure I need you to stick around and keep the bed warm for an old man, though.”

Rust’s eyes flash with a hint of mirth while he hoists his black duffel up on one shoulder and moves toward the door. “Alright then, old man,” he echoes, holding his foot in the jamb while Marty gets a handle on their suitcases. “If you get those bags in the trunk I’ll bring Ghost out here in a minute. Shelley’s gonna be wondering where the fuck we got off to.”

“This early in the day?” Marty snorts, maneuvering out the front door into the cool morning air. “Shit, I bet she ain’t even opened her eyes yet.”

Rust watches him thud down the porch steps and jimmy the keys out of his shirt pocket to unlock the Cadillac before turning back inside, getting the cat gathered up in one arm and her overnight box in the other. She meows a bit pitifully and Rust gently shushes her under his breath, scanning around the kitchen one last time to make sure they’d gotten everything.

He mentally touches the few things weighing down his pockets, reminding himself they’re all there and in good order lest he leaves them behind for a week.

Marty is waiting with the key when he steps through the front door onto the porch, the stained planking still damp with morning dew under their feet. Ghost perks up when she notices they’re headed toward the car, ears twitching as she listens to the early-rising songbirds call out to one another from between the oak trees.

Their suitcases are already loaded up and Marty walks between the Ford and Cadillac, patting the red hood of the old truck as he passes by. “Enjoy retirement, buddy,” he says, low enough that he doesn’t think Rust caught it, but when he turns to open the driver-side door he finds two familiar eyes watching him over the car’s roof.

“I imagine two trips across the country is plenty enough for now,” Rust says, mouth quirking some in the morning light. “Might not make it through a third.”

Marty feels his cheeks go a tinge hotter but doesn’t add anything to that as they both fold themselves into the car. “You gonna be able to keep this cat under control?” he asks instead, looking at Ghost where she’s already sitting up in Rust’s lap to look out the window. “Last thing we need is a wreck.”

“She ain’t gonna bother you,” Rust says, setting the cardboard carrier between his feet, man and calico making a strange sight in the passenger seat if Marty’s ever seen one. “Always been good in the car.”

Marty huffs to himself and cranks over the engine, turning to brace his hand on Rust’s headrest so they can back out of the driveway. “Should’ve gotten a damn dog,” he mumbles, waiting for another car to pass before letting his foot off the break.

Rust’s eyes slant over for a second before he squints out the windshield. “He don’t mean it,” he says, running a finger down Ghost’s back while he tries to bite back a laugh. “He’s just smartin’ because he knows he’ll miss you the whole time we’re gone.”

“Yeah, that’d be the day,” Marty grunts, steering them out of the subdivision to fall in line behind a few other morning commuters. And Rust doesn’t say anything, but Marty knows he can’t look back over at him and the cat unless he wants to break resolve and smile.

“You wanna call Shelley?” he asks, glancing at the clock on the dash.

“Naw,” Rust says, settling back as he watches the streetlights begin to flicker off one by one on the roadside. “She knows we’re on our way.”  
  
  
  
  
  


Twenty minutes later the heart of Lafayette finds a black Cadillac idling in front of Shelley Larson’s townhouse, parked a few yards behind a dark pickup truck resting at the curb. Marty pulls the keys out of the ignition and narrows his eyes at it before silently mouthing the license plate number to himself, shaking his head when he can’t remember the right one.

“Is that…?” he starts, drumming his fingers on the wheel while he squares his jaw in thought. “Is that Peter’s damn truck? No it ain’t—fuck, I think it is.”

“Considering he ain’t a Cowboys fan,” Rust says, vaguely pointing out the decal of a cartoon boy peeing on the team logo plastered in the car’s rear window. “That’s our man Munroe.”

“Holy shit,” Marty says after a second, and both of them have run enough surveillance for cheating spouse cases to know that all signs point to a long-lived sleepover of the adult persuasion. He chuckles low and wicked in the back of his throat and jimmies his handle to step out into the morning air. “That woman went and snagged her one now, right out of the fishing barrel.”

Rust sighs and gets out with Ghost still in arm, passing her box over to Marty when the other man comes around the rear of the car. “I ain’t surprised,” he says. “The way they’ve been making eyes at one another n’ all.”

“ _Makin’ eyes_ ,” Marty echoes in a startling mockup of Rust’s voice. “Like how?”

“I know that dopey lovestruck look when I see it,” Rust says, squinting up at the ribbon of sunlight prying through the narrow alley between Shelley’s townhouse and one next door. He turns and gives Marty a quick onceover, pulling his eyes up from his feet to the top of his head in one burning flourish. “See it on your face all the time.”

He wipes his boots across the mat at the front door and then knocks two times, still keeping an arm around Ghost where she’s propped up against one shoulder. The tip of Marty’s nose is as pink as a cherry and he shifts his weight around from foot to foot, glancing at Rust from the corner of his eye.

“You hush,” he mumbles, sniffing and looking away again, still flushing bright. “It fuckin’ is not.”

There’s only silence on the other side of the door when Rust leans in a bit closer, listening. He waits a few moments and then considers the lit-up doorbell button before pressing a fingertip against it so a chime rings somewhere in the townhouse.

“We’re gonna feel like a couple dirty old men if Peter’s in there changing her lightbulbs or some shit,” Marty half-whispers, and then mulls over what he just said with his brows slightly pinched together. “At 7:27 in the morning.”

“We both know he ain’t running a handyman business on the side,” Rust says, and then steps back when he hears muffled voices shortly followed by heavy-heeled steps on the floor inside. Both men swivel their eyes to the door as the security chain unbolts with a clatter and somebody turns the knob.

Peter Munroe peers out at them with his face still soft and mussed with sleep, naked save for his boxer shorts and unlaced work boots. “Uh, Mr. Hart,” he says by way of greeting, opening the door wider before running a hand up one ink-sleeved arm. “Mr. Cohle, come on in. Sorry about that—Shelley’ll be out in a second.”

He shuffles aside to let them through and bites hard into his bottom lip to keep a wily grin from splitting across his face. Rust steps into the foyer without a word while Marty narrows his eyes, setting Ghost’s box down by the door before tucking both hands into his pockets and falling into stance with his weight carefully balanced on one hip.

“We interrupting somethin’ here, Pete?” he asks, tipping his head a little to the side. “Some fraternization, maybe.”

“The man’s off the clock, Marty,” Rust says, turning to pass a brief look between them. “Cut him a fuckin’ break.”

Peter shuts the door and shuffles past Marty toward the kitchen, hitching his boxers up further on one side to cover the edges of a dark tattoo crawling along his hip. “Can I get either of you a cup of coffee?” he says, raising both eyebrows and hiding another smile behind his mug as lighter footsteps sound on the staircase.

“Uh, no thanks man, we gotta—be back on the road pretty soon,” Marty says, and then Shelley pokes her head over the side of the banister with her loose hair hanging down long and wavy.

“Oh my Lord,” she says in a voice pitched higher than usual, descending the rest of the way with one hand clutching her dressing gown closed at the neck, pale face gone bright and rosy. “We’re just having us a regular southern scandal this morning, aren’t we?”

“Morning, Miss Shelley,” Rust says, finally setting Ghost down by his feet before watching her slink off to crouch under the dining room table. He looks over at the younger woman with his features tuned impassive, like this might be any other morning at the office. “Stella around anywhere?”

Shelley blinks and lets the death grip on her satin robe loose, raking both hands back through her hair. “I’m not sure where she’s gotten off to,” she says, padding into the kitchen and sharing a private look with Peter that makes landfall between his eyes like a throwing dart. “We…uhm—we didn’t have time to put her up anywhere before y’all got here.”

All three men watch as she starts picking up cups and putting them back down in the kitchen while she prattles, refolding and moving a dishtowel that was already hanging on the cabinet door under the kitchen sink.

“I don’t think Stella and Miss Ghost will have any problems, but if they do I’ll keep Stella upstairs for a little while,” she says, seemingly pained, picking up a bottle of aspirin off the counter and knocking back a few pills with the lukewarm contents of a glass that had already been resting there. It clinks down harder on the granite than she might’ve intended as she laughs a bit breathlessly. “Not that either of them have ever been a problem before, being perfect little ladies and all.”

As if on cue, a black and whiskered face peeks from around the couch, quickly glancing up at Rust with wide green eyes before honing in on the calico still sitting under the dining room table.

“Uh-huh,” Marty says, craning his neck around to watch Stella slowly pad across the floor. “Here we go.”

In the kitchen from behind Shelley’s shoulder, Peter’s mouth tightens up while he goes to pull the spray nozzle up from by the sink, brandishing it like a weapon.

“Peter,” Shelley warns, watching him slowly move to turn on the faucet. “I don’t think—”

“If they get into it, babe, it won’t last very long,” Peter says, standing on tiptoe to watch the cats over the edge of the counter with knife-gash smile spreading across his face. “I’ve broken up a kitty fight a time or two in my day.”

“Let ‘em be for a second,” Rust says, keeping a close eye on Stella, and the moment she bolsters up and gallops across the dining room toward Ghost they wind up toe-to-toe with both their tails puffed up and rigid, nearly vibrating on the spot until somebody lets out a low yowl.

An arc of water shoots across the dining room but both cats are already gone before it hits the ground, Stella whipping through the house with Ghost in hot pursuit. Their feet thunder across the hardwood floor as they chase one another around the living room before bolting up the stairs.

Everybody is quiet for a long moment, and then Peter blows out a heavy sigh as he knocks the faucet off, wordlessly moving to pick up a dishtowel and slouch into the dining room to mop up the puddle there.

Marty wipes a hand down his face in a slow drag and drops both eyes to his wristwatch. “Hey listen,” he says, shifting his weight unevenly, “I like watching Wild Kingdom as much as the next guy, but we got a plane to catch and the morning commute don’t get any easier heading up toward Alexandria.”

Rust turns and slowly blinks at him, lips parting the barest fraction like he’s going to ask something before thinking otherwise. Instead he turns and nods once at Shelley, already moving back toward the front door as his voice carries over to her.  
  
“Appreciate you watching her,” he says, and Ghost is nowhere in sight now but his meaning is clear. “Brought some food and a towel in the box, might help her settle in if you gotta separate them. Reception ain’t the best up in some parts of the state but give me a call if you need anything.”

He gets a hand on the door and turns as he opens it, running a finger across his brow in a halfhearted salute when Peter straightens and catches his eye. Marty is close behind in Rust’s wake, feeling jittery nerves slowly start to shake and quiver in his clammy palms, and has to swallow down the urge to say something about Rust not moving fast enough.

They’re halfway to the car when the door reopens and Shelley’s voice carries across the morning air. “Hold up, you two!” she calls, padding on bare feet over the wet concrete until she’s standing at the edge of the driveway, clutching her robe closer around her chest again. Rust and Marty both turn together like synchronized clockwork to watch her, the latter already bouncing his keys in hand.

“Where do you think you’re going without a proper goodbye?” Shelley murmurs, smiling despite the pinkness flushing her throat again. She takes two steps closer, rubbing her hands along her upper arms, eyes cast somewhere else across the street. “Listen, if there’s a problem with me and Peter working together, I can…well. I can try to—”

“Ain’t no big thing,” Rust says, squinting at her with a hand held like a visor over his eyes now that the sun is peeking above the townhouse roof. “Long as you and Peter don’t have any problems, should be fine. Marty?”

Marty shrugs a bit, looking down at his shoes while he tries to bite the crooked grin threatening to spread across his face. “Just take my word for it,” he says, idly jingling the car keys again, “when I say I don’t got much room to talk.”

Shelley seems to decompress a little at that, shoulders dropping while the rising sun makes the flyaway hairs around her head light up like an auburn halo.

“You can keep your secrets, Martin Hart,” she says with a small smile, moving forward to touch Marty’s shoulder until he turns and opens up to her, arms wrapping around her back in a tight hug. “You two be careful and don’t get into any trouble, you hear me? I need job security.”  

Rust blinks at her and feels the corners of his mouth twitch as she pads the few steps over to him, holding one arm out so he can pull her against his side. “Take care, Miss Shelley.”

“Send me a postcard or something,” Shelley says, sniffing a little suspiciously but grinning up at him when she pulls away. “And enjoy your _vacation_ , Mr. Cohle.”

Marty’s already folding himself back down into the driver’s seat when Rust steps over and opens the passenger door, pausing to turn and peer at Shelley before he gets in. “I will,” he says, watching one of her eyebrows quirk up the slightest bit. “We will.”  
  
  


* * *  
  


“We’re cuttin’ it close,” Marty murmurs for the third time in the hour and fifteen minutes it takes them to finally spot the airport exit coming up on the horizon, and Rust has long since lost count of how many times the other man’s eyes have darted between the dashboard clock and rolling highway. “Cutting it mighty close indeed.”

“It won’t take long to park and check the bags,” Rust says as he watches cars slowly begin merging into the exit lane around them, and his gut feels like a roiling eel but Marty doesn’t need to know that just yet. “Don’t imagine it’s too busy in the middle of the work week.”

“I’m not worried about how busy it is,” Marty says, glancing over one shoulder to check his blind spot before changing lanes. “I’m worried I won’t remember how to get around the goddamn terminal, considering I haven’t been through the airport in probably a good five years.”

Rust rolls a handful of memories like glass marbles around in his head, cats’ eyes and blue glass and smoky pink quartz too thick to see through. He knows he and Marty were both airlifted off the ground once they’d been pulled from the winding thicket tunnels of Carcosa, but at the time he’d been somewhere too far from waking to worry about much of anything at all.

“Paris,” he says abruptly, as if he’d caught a rolling marble in one hand with the quick strike of one palm. “Paris was the last time I flew. After I left the army.”

Marty’s eyes slant over for a second before he blinks a few times. “If you were anybody else I wouldn’t believe it,” he says, glancing up when terminal signs start appearing and diverging into different routes above their heads. “That was—Jesus, Rust, that was probably something like ten years before we even met.”

“Close,” Rust says, recalling the first two hours over the Atlantic spent with his head crammed between his knees while bruising ochre-tangerine pounded behind his eyes, and then the handful of mixed pills he’d hoovered up in a haze before his last flight back home to the mainland. “You know I’d sooner drive.”

“Yeah,” Marty scoffs.  “To the ends of the earth, apparently.” He’s quiet for a moment, sliding the heel of his hand around to rest at the low point in the steering wheel, jaw squaring while he works something over in his mind. “Should we have planned better for this?” he asks, not quite looking at Rust this time. “I mean—got you something for nerves, shit, I don’t know.”

Rust drops both eyes into his lap and realizes that he’s been spending the past thirty miles slowly tearing the edges off a gas station receipt, leaving tiny bits of paper strewn between his thighs like white confetti. He immediately crumples up what’s left of the slip and throws it in the floorboard, feeling a sharp prick of cold sweat bloom between his shoulders as embarrassment washes down his body in a wave.

“Fuck’s sake,” he hisses, more to himself than Marty, and brushes most of the mess off his legs before tightening both hands around his knees so he isn’t tempted to bring a thumbnail up to his mouth. “Listen—I don’t need nothing for it. I’ll be fine.”

Marty eyes him a little warily but looks back ahead without pressing the matter any further, crouching down to squint at an overhead sign before steering left down an off-ramp. A high-rise parking garage looms ahead and they fall into line behind a few other cars, tunneling down to get in through the meter.

“Don’t know how I feel about leaving the car for a week,” he murmurs, easing his foot off the break to coast behind a blue minivan. “Least it’s out of the weather here in the garage, I guess.”

He rolls down the window when they get to the ticket meter, accepting another little pink slip of paper that gets tucked up into one corner of the windshield. Halogen lamps light up the dark garage and Rust can scent the cold concrete smell of the place, harboring the damp chill of Louisiana autumn.

They don’t find an empty spot until they’re halfway up the fourth level and Marty noses the Cadillac into it without a second thought. The dashboard clock reads just a few minutes before nine and they’ve both glanced at the printout plane tickets enough to know boarding starts in forty-five minutes on the dot.

When the ignition turns off, they sit in silence for a long moment all the same.

Neither man wants to say anything but their eyes eventually meet at the corners, and it’s Marty who finally lets out wisp of breathy laughter that makes Rust’s stomach honest-to-God flutter up behind his rib cage.

“Well,” he says, reaching up to scratch through the whiskers on his jaw, eyes cornflower-bright here in the dim parking garage. “Are we gonna do this or what?”

Rust’s head is swimming with a mosaic of sensation and thought painted over one another in a thousand different brushstrokes, too dense and intermingled to tease out a single color. He wants to split himself down the middle and say everything here, spill it into the floor around their feet while the moment might be ripe for picking—but in the end he only swallows and blinks back at the man sitting to his left, eyes dropping like a tether to the gold band on his left hand.

“Yeah,” he says, nodding to himself and Marty before opening the door. “Let’s go.”

  
  
  


For all his rueful comments and murmurings about _this place being built with half the mind to fuck a man over_ , Marty navigates their path through the airport terminal with a practiced kind of ease.

Rust supposes it shouldn’t have come as any sort of surprise—Marty had always been good at this kind of thing, at walking and talking and carrying himself like a man who knew what he was doing, at least where regular people were involved. Like his self-assurance had the power to be reassuring.

He flashes the pretty middle-aged woman behind the baggage check-in a rogue kind of smile, lightly jokes and jabs with the uniformed agent who instructs them to take their shoes off before walking through the metal detector. He does all this and then still takes Rust’s duffel bag, carefully setting it down in front of his on the conveyor belt before leading the way through the security checkpoint in his socked feet.

The metal detector doesn’t scream treachery and Rust’s lungs let go of a breath he hadn’t really known he was holding, hand come up to touch some dull phantom pain ringing like a tuning fork on his left side.

Marty turns and looks at him with faint understanding in his eyes, which have dropped right to the place where a triplet of faded scars rest under Rust’s shirt. They don’t dwell there long, though, and he looks up again until Rust is standing at his side and pulling his boots and bag off the belt.

“You good?” he asks in a low voice, and Rust pulls his shoelaces tighter, trying to straighten out the faint tremor in his fingers.

“Fine,” he says, sucking in a lungful of air as he straightens back up, blinking under the fluorescent lights. “Unless they plan on trying to strip search us before we make it to the fucking gate.”

The laugh Marty lets out edges just the finest bit on the err side of being nervous. “Not unless you give them a reason to.” He lowers his voice again and moves in close to Rust’s side as they start walking further down the terminal, passing through long bars of sunlight coming through the high glass windows. “You mailed everything up to that friend of yours, right? Everything that needed mailing.”

An intercom voice faintly hums ahead and Rust hoists his bag up further on one shoulder, concentrating on the sound of their footfalls amidst the muted din of the airport. “Yeah,” he says, fingering the edges of a mental snapshot containing one yellow envelope taped shut with a pair of pocketknives and a handwritten promissory note. “Got word it arrived a few days ago.”

Marty nods, not bothering to question any further on Rust’s friend just yet. He rolls one small carry-on suitcase behind him, packed with everything they might need between Louisiana, the layover in Seattle, and once they’re fresh off the plane in Juneau. His own new coat is folded in with Rust’s older one, tucked alongside their toothbrushes and an unopened box of nicotine patches that only half their party knows is coming along for the trip.

At their gate the waiting area for the flight to Seattle is fuller than expected, leaving two open seats few and far in between. Men in suits already creased with wrinkles talk on phones pressed to their ears, some in low voices and others loud enough to carry hearty and boisterous across the terminal. A young woman in a maroon suit jacket has a laptop balanced on her knees, furiously typing something out with a pen clamped between her teeth and ribbon-tied sprigs of inked lavender peeking out from under one sleeve. Plenty of single folks going by the looks of them, a few leaning close enough to be tied together in pairs, and then a small handful of families—mostly young and tired, one with a sullen pre-teen slumped in his seat and young children they keep having to scold to keep close.

Rust doesn’t realize he’s frozen where he stands until Marty’s hand touches the back of his arm, gently guiding him further away where there are a few rows of empty seats near the large windows. He drops down into a chair, gingerly setting his duffel down between his boots, and ignores the excited chatter of two little boys as they press their hands up against the glass a few seats down to watch a plane begin taxying down the runway.

The attendant at the desk announces that boarding will begin inside the next ten minutes, and Rust hasn’t needed a cigarette this bad in a long time. Craving aches in his teeth and itches in his fingertips but he only clenches his jaw, the muscle jumping and twitching beneath one ear.

“Gotta use the john real quick,” he says before he even fully thinks the thought through, bracing both hands on his knees before standing. His eyes dart further down the terminal to where the sign for the men’s room is lit up in blue and white. “Only be a minute or two.”

Marty checks the time on his phone and looks up, lips slightly parted in question. He blinks but then gives a short nod, settling back into his seat. “Alright,” he says, clearing his throat a little. “I’ll be right here.”

In the bathroom Rust takes a quick leak at the urinal and then rinses both hands at the sink, bringing his fingers up to press cold and firm against his eyes and temples. The coolness helps relieve the faint ticking somewhere in the back of his head but his skin still feels like it’s vibrating, too-warm and clammy all at once.

He looks at himself in the wide mirror above the row of sinks, trying to focus on his eyes and nothing else, dark pinpricks of endless black surrounded with deep blue. It’s him looking back, just him, nobody else. And his pulse is calm but he closes his eyes and brings two fingers up to find it in old habit, letting the mild beat under his ear thump until he thinks he might be able to hear it.

A toilet flushes at the far end of the restroom and a man in a grey daytime suit walks out with a dial-lock briefcase and a small rolling bag in tow. He glances at Rust and then starts scrubbing his hands, looking up so their eyes catch in the mirror.

“Flight nerves?” he says, and Rust realizes he’s forgotten to drop his hand away from his pulse.

A small sigh whistles out between his teeth as he nods, eyes skirting away like a startled bird. “Something like that.”

“Used to be like that before I started traveling so much for work,” the man says, peering over the tops of his glasses as he flicks his hands into the sink. “Those frequent flyer miles will snap you out of the mindset pretty quick.”

Rust stays quiet and the man moves behind him, pulling a wad of paper towels out of the dispenser. “You traveling with anybody? Always better than going alone.”

Before he can answer, Rust sees a familiar figure walk in with his shoulders set, eyes swerving right to the both of them. Marty walks over slowly but with his weight shifted back onto his heels, offering up a small smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes to the passing businessman who only blinks at the two of them before leaving without another word.

“Hey,” Marty says, echoing slightly in the empty bathroom. His eyes rove over Rust’s face like he’s trying to find the right words there. “Was starting to think you’d gone and fell in.”

Rust’s gaze flickers to him and then away again. His hands are trembling now to match the shudder rolling in his gut and he knows Marty can see it plain as day. “This is some real fucking bullshit,” he says, voice sagging hoarse somewhere in the middle. “Making a scene of myself.”

“C’mon, babe,” Marty says, soft as anything, one hand moving to touch the black feathers on Rust’s forearm. “I left some old blue-hair with our bags. We can have a moment but it ain’t gonna be here in this bathroom.”

Marty’s fingers snake down to press into the heart of his hand, and then Rust lets him lead the way.

Out in the bustling terminal Marty finds a few seats further down at an empty gate, quiet and hidden next to a pillar and potted palm tree. They sit and the distant drone of the attendant at their gate is giving a three-minute warning, but neither man pays her much mind.

“You really don’t like flying,” Marty says, at a loss for much of anything else. He tries on an easy smile and waits until Rust looks up at him. “Out of all the shit you’ve coasted through without breaking a sweat.”

Rust draws his hands into his lap while the line of his throat bobs. “Easier to keep level with my own two feet planted on the fucking ground, yeah.”

“You know they say it’s safer than driving for the most part,” Marty says, trying his best to be reassuring. Rust doesn’t move and Marty reaches out again to touch the back of his hand. “And I’ll be there with you the whole time, you need anything—you know that.”

They sit in silence for a few moments, Rust deciphering the geometric pattern on the carpet, Marty nodding at the woman whose eyes stray to them as she clacks by in her patent heels.

“You’re too good to me, Marty,” Rust finally says on exhale, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “Too damn good.”

“Well, someone’s got to be,” Marty says, rising to his feet with a grunt. He holds out a hand and waits until Rust takes it to help pull him up. “For now we’ve got a plane to catch. You gonna be alright?”

They start walking back down the terminal, shoulder to shoulder, Marty tossing up an amiable wave to the old man craning his neck to find them through the crowd. That rabbit foot is jackhammering in Rust’s chest again but he tries to turn it on itself, breathing in deep and silent while he remembers all the times Marty’s asked him that question inside twenty years of the past.

“Yeah,” he says, knowing it’s damn well worth weathering the journey to reach their destination. “Haven’t made it this far to back out now.”

“Amen to that, baby,” Marty says through a laugh while he claps Rust on the shoulder, the warm sound of his voice drowning out everything else for a moment. “Amen to that.”

  
  
* * *  
  
  


Seattle is wet and grey through the airplane window, dotted in thick droplets gathering across the glass. Most of the cabin is already on their feet, murmuring and nudging down the aisle as they pull their luggage from the overhead bins.

Rust has a cup of ginger ale and a few sips of Marty’s orange juice in his stomach but hadn’t been able to touch anything else the flight attendant offered them somewhere over Colorado, watching him with a mildly concerned expression on her face while she passed with the concession cart.

The window seat had been given to Marty without a second thought edgewise, and by some small miracle the third person in their row had never shown up. Or maybe Marty had planned it that way when he booked the tickets—either way the coin fell, Rust only knew he was downright thankful. He’d needed the extra room to breathe.

But now they’re back on the ground again for the next two hours and the family three rows ahead is filing out into the center aisle and steadily moving toward the front. Marty starts shuffling around with a little more urgency, passing the paperback book he’d brought along between both hands, and Rust takes that as his cue to start moving.

“Easy does it,” Marty murmurs, low enough that it was more of a sound than his voice, but Rust gets his feet up underneath him and then lets Marty ease past him to open up the overhead compartment. He shoulders his duffel and then leads the way to the front of the plane, nodding in kind to the attendant who offered him a bite-sized chocolate bar produced from her own pocket.

He hadn’t taken it, but she winks at him with smile lines framing her eyes as they step out of the cabin all the same.

The plastic-blue smell of the plane is gone and Rust sucks in fresher air perfumed with cold rainwater, carried in through the cracks and crevices and on the damp coats of Seattleites rushing to catch their flights in the terminal. Neither man moves with any sort of hurry, ambling along with the flow of the crowd while the intercom tones overhead. The walls in the atrium they pass through are plated glass stretching three stories up to the ceiling, letting pale light in from the overcast sky above.

At their flight gate, a red marquee spells out departure for Juneau verging on nearly two hours from now. Most of the seats in the waiting area are empty, save for a dark-haired woman and a young boy still wearing his green rain slicker as he reads a book sitting cross-legged on the floor. The woman is busy talking on the phone with a cup of coffee balanced on her knee, and only briefly glances up at Rust and Marty before going back to her conversation.

They settle down in two seats by the window a few yards away, backs against the glass to face and watch the rest of the airport. The clock has gained two hours since they left Louisiana, and it’s still only a scant handful of minutes past eleven in the morning.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Marty says at last with a long sigh, kicking his shoes out to cross both legs at the ankle. At any other point in the lives the statement would’ve been fine-lined with something patronizing, but here and now all Rust can hear is the edge of relief. “Did just fine.”

“Depending on your idea of what constitutes as fine, maybe,” Rust says, eyes scanning across the trio of flight attendants that pass by wheeling their suitcases behind them, one with a crimson silk scarf tied like a gash at her throat. The stomach-rolling nausea had finally subsided about an hour into the flight, but he already feels wrung out and heavy in his limbs, skin prickling with the imminent knowledge of another plane ride over nothing but wide open ocean.

“Well, considering nobody’s dead or maimed and we got here in one piece, I’ll count that as a victory,” Marty says, eyes somewhere else across the terminal. There’s a neon-lit sign in shades of familiar white and green and he pats his wallet in his pocket before standing up. “Gonna run and get a coffee real quick. You want anything? Maybe something to settle your stomach.”

“Naw,” Rust says, swallowing thickly and trying not to clench his teeth at the thought. “You go on ahead.”

When Marty’s back disappears behind a pillar and then blends into a throng of passing bodies, Rust blinks to himself and passes a hand over his eyes, only vaguely listening to the woman a few seats away ask the boy if he’s ready for lunch yet. A few sandwiches wrapped in plastic are produced from her handbag like doves from a top hat upon request, and the pair of them sit together in companionable silence, munching through a shared bag of apple slices while Rust reaches down into his duffel and pulls out his black notebook.

Marty’d always called it a ledger, even in those days when the old echo of _Tax Man_ was long since resigned to the back of the bull pen’s collective mind, but it’d been enough that the word had somehow put down roots and stuck. At least in Marty’s mind, and that was one relic preserved fine and pristine from the very first hour after they’d stepped inside Quesada’s office and shaken hands.

 _If you don’t mind me askin’_ , Marty had said from across their desks already wedged together in a head butt, swiveling a little in his chair while he peered at Rust from the corner of his eye like a man still holding strong onto his suspicions, _do all the detectives down in Texas carry around a ledger?_

Here and now, Rust opens it up and gently flips through the filled pages at the front, passing over all the memories he’s gathered in the few months since he started a new book near the end of summer. Marty’s 55th birthday in the final bow of August manifested in a dozing figure on page three, a pair of bobwhites pecking around the back yard early in the morning a day or two later. Lilah’s first steps written out in longhand and dated, and then a memorized stanza of poetry or two pulled like dusty ribbons from behind an old bookshelf.

A far cry from the cardboard box of black notebooks he’d toted in the bed of his truck on the last long pilgrimage up to Alaska. Seven years’ worth, and none of the ones back then could have dreamt of holding the likeness of a little calico stretched out in the sun or anything about Martin Hart outside an address or name dropped from his mouth and onto the margins of a page scrawled over with murder. Much less, Rust knows, anything bordering along the edges of being romantic.

Rust tends to keep his work notes separate these days. And it hadn’t been too hard, when it came down to it, leaving that notebook back home.

He’s flipping over to an untouched page and creasing the seam between the paper when Marty comes back with steaming coffee and plastic cup of ice water in hand, still standing in front of Rust to peer down at the open ledger.

“I had a thought, while I was standing in line,” Marty says, face pinching up for just a second while he pauses to take a sip of hot coffee. “Couple thoughts, really.”

Rust’s eyes flicker up to him before they drop back into his notebook as he pulls a pen off the cover. “I’d be concerned if you didn’t.”

“Shit,” Marty says on the sharp edge of a laugh, dropping back down into the empty seat next to Rust and passing the water cup over. “All signs point to you feeling back to normal, I reckon. Take a few sips of this, I had to pay a nickel for the goddamn cup even though the water was free.”

Their fingers brush as the cup exchanges between two hands, and Rust takes a few paltry sips of water before setting it aside and clearing his throat. “You gonna share these couple thoughts?”

Marty tilts his head a little to one side, eyes cast somewhere far across the terminal while he thumbs across the whiskers on his top lip. “Well, I just got to wondering,” he says, hand dropping back down into his lap. “Have—have you ever really taken an honest vacation in your life? I mean, you always said Paris, but I reckon sitting drunk in front of the fuckin’ Louvre doesn’t exactly qualify.”

The question hits Rust at an angle he wasn’t prepared to catch, and he feels a vague frown pull at his mouth while he mulls that thought over. It’d be ridiculous, maybe, save for the fact that he can’t really figure a time in his life when he’d ever gone somewhere without the Job pulling him there or the devil riding hard at his back.

“It was Notre Dame,” he says, and then sits back to sink down a little in his seat. “Don’t guess you’d call it a vacation, least in the typical sense of the word.” The memory itself exists in a sort of booze-addled fugue now, where mental snapshots he could’ve pulled from a textbook are overlaid with smells and tastes and colors, mostly piss-dirty water in side streets and the halved loaf of warm bread he’d been offered when somebody figured he’d needed it. “Wasn’t a road trip down to Florida in the family station wagon or nothin’.”

“I’ll take that as a no, then,” Marty says, popping the lid off his coffee to drink straight from the cup before he lowers his voice to something pitched softer around the edges. “So what I really want is for you to try and commit to this trip being the real deal, now. No work, none of your sniffing around looking for something to dig up. This ain’t a job—it’s an opportunity to see some shit, do some shit, and _relax_.”

Rust’s brows quirk up for a second, eyes strayed over to waver on the little boy nearly nose-to-nose with his book now. “How long you been stewing on that?”

“Not too long,” Marty says with a sigh. “Just long enough to figure it might bear some repeating.”

Quiet dips and wanes between them for a few moments, Rust fingering the blank pages of his ledger but not bothering to put anything down in ink. He draws in a deep breath and then lets it go, eyes moving to land somewhere over in Marty’s lap.

“You know, Marty,” he says, “I’d never planned to go back up there, after the last time I left. Made my peace with the place a long time ago.”

Marty seems to stiffen a bit, eyes on the side of Rust’s face. “What might that mean?”

“Means what it means,” Rust says, absentmindedly flexing his left hand against one thigh. “Means a lot of shit’s changed since then.”

“Reckon that’s true,” Marty says warmly enough, gently bumping his knee against the other man’s so Rust finally draws both eyes up to look at him.

“I’m just glad to be taking you up there, now,” he says after a moment, watching Marty’s mouth. “So you can see the beauty of the place, cold as it is. I don’t figure there’s anything else quite like it.”

Marty chuckles, bringing the coffee cup back up to his lips to murmur against the rim in lieu of taking a drink. His eyes go glassy for a moment, unfocused and briefly lost elsewhere. “All this feels kinda surreal, if you know what I mean.”

Rust does know what he means, in some ways Marty might not realize or understand just yet—or maybe he does, really goddamn does, and they’re still silently walking the tightrope of that truth together without toeing into one another’s darkest parts just yet.

He thinks about a decade ago, packing what was left of his life in Louisiana into cardboard boxes, how everything he didn’t leave like bones on the curbside fit into the bed of a pickup truck. How back then, that was all he needed—that was all he had left to lay any claim to.

“Sometimes,” Rust starts, swallowing a little thickly, “I wonder to myself if it all isn’t some kind of fever dream.” He doesn’t tell Marty about the few nights he still lies awake in bed, listening to another man’s easy breathing, wondering if that last synaptic misfire of euphoria before the mind and body succumbs to death could last him an entire lifetime. “But then again, most of my dreams have always been more kin to nightmares. This is too damn good for any of that.”

His own words stir a strangle ripple in mind, like a lone finger dipped into the stagnant pool of memory, but Marty is moving before he can dive down any further to find it.

“We’re a couple sad sons of bitches, aren’t we,” he says, and it sounds like it was meant to pair with a laugh that never quite makes it. Instead Marty brushes their arms together again, a passing touch come and gone that still makes electricity prickle along Rust’s skin in its wake. “I just consider myself lucky, I guess. Think I’ve told you as much before.”

They both look up to watch as a pair of younger women walk over and settle down in the waiting area, already bundled up in thick cardigans and loose scarves. Rust gets caught up in their colors and textures for a moment, picking out ivory wool and brown leather, the silver tinkle of one’s bangles and the rose tint of the other’s round sunglasses.

“I don’t know whether I rely more on luck or fate anymore,” he says, turning back toward Marty even though his eyes are elsewhere out the terminal window. “Used to be neither one made any fucking sense.”

Marty watches Rust and can’t help but smile, feels like something downright dopey if he’s honest, and the reason why isn’t so lost on him as it might’ve been years ago.

“Way I see it,” he says, catching the corner of Rust’s eye and earning that hard-won little twitch of a mouth, “there ain’t any reason you can’t believe in both.”  
  


* * *  
  
  


The first glimpse of Juneau unfurling like a quilted map beneath them is something Rust never thought he’d see.

At least not like this, leaning over Marty’s lap in the smaller passenger jet to peer out the plane window as they slowly start to descend. He tries to keep himself steady but falters anyway in the end, sagging a little into the other man’s side while his heart kicks up a notch in his throat at the sight.

Marty’s hand somehow snakes between them, pressing a little crooked but warm against Rust’s stomach just above the nylon seat belt cutting into his middle. “Hey now,” he says softly, peering at Rust’s face before turning to look back out the window at the peaked mountains and winding rivers framing the eastern face of the territory.

“Damn,” Marty says with a tiny laugh, fingers curling a little in Rust’s flannel. “Even from up here, it sure is pretty.”

Rust sits back in his seat and sucks in a shallow breath, keeping one hand on Marty’s and the other pressed flush against his thigh to keep it from shaking. “That’s hardly nothin’,” he says, even though seeing the land from above for the first time was enough to make his eyes burn. “Wait til you see where I grew up.”

Marty turns away from the window, backlit by an oval of pure blue sky. “I thought you said you lived here in Juneau.”

“When I was working the fishing boats, back around ‘02,” Rust says, swallowing against the faint taste of those words in his mouth. “Not when I was a boy. We’re gonna have to ride further north for that.”

“How much further north?” Marty asks with a quiet snort, narrowing his eyes. “You didn’t tell me we were gonna be driving clear up into the Arctic Circle.”

“Didn’t plan on driving,” Rust says, pulling Marty’s hand away from his stomach to turn it face-up, holding it there between them. He takes the tip of his middle finger and gently follows the longest diagonal line in Marty’s palm from one far corner up to the heart, tracing the line of an invisible map.

“Northeast of Fairbanks, up in wilder boreal country,” Rust says, blinking into the borders of a memory. “Almost to the circle. Pop used to say we could sit in the privy and put our feet up in the arctic.”

Marty tries to gauge such a distance in his head and comes up short, but he knows it can’t be anything less than eight hours in the car. “Didn’t plan on driving?” he repeats, closing his hand around Rust’s. “Since when?”

The flight attendant comes back on the intercom and announces their arrival in Juneau within the next five minutes. Rust only glances sideways at Marty before looking straight ahead again, not quite letting his hand go until a few stretched moments later.

“Since it’d take us eighteen hours’ driving time,” he says, knowing the distance full well from experience. “And I happen to know a better way.”

  
  
  
  


Four years and another lifetime later, the air still smells just the same as it always did. Sterile-steel cold laced with a pinch of sea salt and something dug clean out of the old earth, something they could only dream of finding in a bottle down in the lower forty-eight. If Rust breathes deep enough he can catch a note of diesel in the back of his throat, heavy and balmy, but there’s no doubt he’s standing in the footprints of Alaska.

Chills crawl over his forearms as he and Marty pass through the sliding doors and walk further into the dwindling daylight, dim-lit in the last few hours before nightfall. It’s still only mid-afternoon but the sun starts setting earlier here after the solstice, letting the cold wind blow through them like wet sheets left out on a line.

“Why’s the only cab in the damn state parked out here in the boonies?” Marty says, the sound of his voice lacking any of its telltale grumble in lieu of something different. Their boots scuff on the salt-ruined concrete and Rust focuses on the twin taillights ahead, winking at him like red eyes from further down the terminal lot. They haven’t pulled their coats from the suitcase yet and he thinks a little about leather jackets and second skins from past lives turning him into different shades of himself.

Alaska probably doesn’t recognize him anymore, considering the last memory it kept of him like a parting gift in its crystal eye. And all truths be told the man who left half a decade ago with hell on his heels and a burden on his back likely wouldn’t know him now, either.

But Marty does.

“You’re already walking different out here,” he murmurs, clearly amused, stopping once they’re out from beneath the airport’s awning to unzip the carry-on bag. “Like Eastwood rollin’ back into town at high noon.”

He pulls out Rust’s old coat first and passes it over without further comment, letting their cold fingers catch and brush around the navy material. Its fraternal twin appears a few moments later, newer and dovetail grey, and hugs around Marty like an old glove once he manages to shrug it on over his flannel shirt.

Rust slips into his own coat and straightens the collar before pushing his hands down into the deepest pockets, and when they reappear he’s holding a piece of paper so crumpled and worn that it almost feels like tissue between his fingers.

“What’s that?” Marty asks with halfhearted curiosity, briefly glancing up from the screen of his phone to watch Rust unfold the paper. “High of forty-six today, I’ll be damned. Thought it was at least freezing out here.”

“Probably close with the wind chill,” Rust murmurs, squinting at what turns out to be a gas station receipt in his hand. Age and heat have blackened most of the slip but he can still read the few sparse lines at the top. _Domo Gasoline, Lake Manitoba Region. 03/23/2010._

He crumples the paper back into a ball, squeezing it into the center of his hand like it might turn to dust there. Marty is already edging over to flag down the shuttle driver and Rust quickly follows in his wake, letting the receipt make landfall in the nearest cigarette urn without lingering long enough to catch the smell.

Their bags pack up neat and square in the trunk and the ruddy-faced kid behind the wheel looks between both men with an expression painted over with lackadaisical routine. “Two bucks a mile, I’ll take you anywhere in Juneau proper.” He sniffs a bit and leans back in his seat, pulling a black beanie down further over his forehead before looking right to Marty. “Where’ll it be, boss?”

Marty huffs out a quiet laugh before peering over at Rust. “You’re the one who knows the way, boss.”

“Chinook’s over off Spear Point,” Rust drawls without missing a beat, sliding into the shuttle first to sit behind the driver. “And don’t take Fritz Cove, we both know it’ll add about six miles to the meter.”

The kid straightens up at that, eyes flashing across the rearview mirror before he moves to crank over the ignition. “Uh, yes sir. Sure thing.”

Marty pulls the door shut behind him and gives the driver a go-ahead before looking over to Rust. “Your friend know we’re on our way?”

They merge out of the airport lane and slowly start winding down an exit that’ll break into the cusp of town. Snow-capped mountains loom to the east, distant and striking enough that Marty almost wonders if he hasn’t stepped into the foreground of a painting.

“Rebecca Barlow?” Rust says, and that’s the first time Marty thinks he’s heard the name, partly surprised to learn that the person they’ve been dealing with all this time is a woman. “Naw, but she will when we show up.”

“You got a reason for wanting to surprise her?”

The thin smile hanging around Rust’s mouth is something caught between fond and wry. “If I give her any more than fifteen minutes’ notice, she’ll call in half the cavalry and have them rip-roaring drunk by the time we step foot in the place.”

Marty’s own mouth screws up into a gapped grin. “You a local celebrity around these parts or something?”

“No,” Rust says, almost firmly. He looks ahead again, watching the water come back into view through the windshield as they edge around the coast of Juneau. “But that still wouldn’t do much to stop her.”

  
  
  
  


Chinook’s is an old bar wedged along the contour of Spear Point, close enough to the water that they can hear waves lapping up against the shore from the front walk. Their bags are on the ground and Rust presses a few bills into the driver’s hand before waving him off with a murmured word or two, not bothering to watch the car kick up dust as it turns back out onto the road.

There are only two or three trucks in the dirt lot at this time of day, and the pale blue paint of the building has long since started flaking off in the briny air. Marty follows movement from the corner of his eye and watches a grey tabby cat slink around the side of the building and disappear behind a stack of crates filled with brown bottles. Not far away, the only sad tree in the lot casts a thin veil of shade over what appears to be a shabby golf cart outfitted with mountain-grade tires that somebody parked there.

“Figured we’ll only be staying around here for the night,” Rust says, hoisting his duffel up on one shoulder before making toward the front door, washed over with a peeling layer of brick-red. “Take the trip up to Fairbanks in the morning.”

Marty sidles up alongside Rust and doesn’t realize how close he is until he has to step back to let the other man fit through the entrance. The door swings wide and Stevie Nicks’ voice falls out into the afternoon air, crooning a tune along the distinct smell of smoke and booze, probably soaked down deep and permanent in the worn wooden floor.

Rust takes two steps inside and then half-turns, catching Marty’s eye. “Only time Fleetwood’s on the juke is when the lady of the house is in.”

“Well you’ve been keeping her wrapped up like a secret all this time,” Marty says, standing two steps below Rust on the wooden ramp with a hand hitched on his thigh. “Let’s get in there so I can meet the woman.”

Something in Rust’s eyes flickers and when the tip of his tongue darts out to wet his bottom lip, Marty thinks that maybe this woman doesn’t know as much as there is to tell about the two of them. Part of his mind knows that rings uncharacteristic of Rustin Cohle, who never gave a good god damn about who or what anybody else thought he was, until an inkling opens and unfurls in the back of his mind like a tiny fist.

Just enough to make him wonder.

“C’mon,” is all Rust says, holding the door open for Marty to step inside on the creaking floorboards, and despite it all he still lets their hips knock and brush as Marty passes by with the suitcase. “She’ll whip us for letting all the heat out.”

Stevie’s voice wraps around them like the tails of a silk scarf inside while it takes a few moments for Marty’s eyes to adjust to the place. It’s all neon draft signs glinting off the face of polished hardwood, the jukebox the brightest beacon of gold light in the room. Two other men sit separate from each other at the far end of the bar furthest from the door, and the woman in a fur-collared denim vest who walks around the bar from the back kitchen with a crate full of beer glasses on her hip seems to speak before she even gets a good look at Rust or Marty.

“I’ll be with you gentlemen in just a minute,” she says, and then stops short when her eyes finally dart over and lock with Rust’s, mouth parting open just the slightest bit. “Well I’ll be—Rustin Cohle, is that you I see over there?”

“Miss Rebecca,” Rust says, taking a step forward without paying any mind to the two bar patrons who slowly turn on their stools to get a look at him themselves. “It’s good to see you.”

“I wasn’t planning on you showing up around here until dark!” Rebecca nearly hollers, setting the crate of glasses down with a rattle to come around and greet him. She has a long ash-blonde braid reaching the middle of her back that seems to have a mind of its own, flipping around like a whip while she hurries over. “Look at you, I can hardly recognize you.”

“Older and uglier since the last time we met, I’d imagine,” Rust says, droll words belied just a little by the small smile hanging around his mouth.

“And here I was thinking you’d finally gotten broke of being a cantankerous old asshole,” Rebecca says in kind. “Me and my wishful thinking.”

She doesn’t hug Rust but takes both his hands in hers and squeezes, leaning close while she laughs and smiles. She’s a full head shorter than both of them even in her boots and has to take a step back before two hazel eyes can finally meet Marty’s.

“You must be the Martin I’ve heard so much about,” Rebecca says, lines around her eyes crinkling up. She reaches out and takes the hand he offers, holding onto it like she’s trying to pass some warmth into his colder fingers. “It’s a real pleasure, and I mean it.”

“Marty’s just fine, ma’am,” Marty says, hoping it’s dark enough in here that she can’t spot the flush crawling up his neck like ivy, and be damned if he knows why it’s there to start. “Rust only calls me Martin when I’m in trouble, seems like.”  

Rebecca laughs at that and gently pulls her hand away to hitch both up on her hips, eyes swiveling between the two of them. “Well,” she says, “come drop those bags behind the bar and let me fix up a few drinks for some road-weary travelers. On the house, since I’m head barkeep tonight—and you can fight me on it later, Rust Cohle, but you know who’s gonna win.”

She zips off to start clinking glasses behind the counter and Marty bites into the grin spreading across his mouth while he tries to decipher the neutral look painted on Rust’s face. “A woman after my own heart,” he says, sliding onto a barstool next to the other man after they tuck their bags away. “Got your shots called in the air.”

A trace of something passes over Rust’s features, come and gone before Marty can really hammer a nail into what it was. “Yeah,” he says, easy enough. “She’s got a mean right hook on her, too.”

“What?” Marty says, chuckling a bit, and then turns back to the bar when Rebecca sets two chilled glasses down in front of them, filled and frothing with something fresh off the tap.  
  
“That’s a little somethin’-somethin’ we brew up local,” she says, pulling a dishtowel off her shoulder to wipe along her side of the bar. “Juneau’s finest.”

Rust picks up his glass and takes a grateful swig off the top before running his thumb across his top lip. “Good stuff,” he says, quiet, “but you’ll have to go easy on us the rest of the night. I don’t shoot ‘em like I used to.”

“Is that so?” Rebecca says, bracing on her forearms on the bar. Marty takes a sip of his own beer, wonderfully cold and flavorful for something piss-yellow, and tries not to let his eyes linger too long on the gold moon charm that dangles low from her neck.

“Yes ma’am,” Rust says, blinking at her with carefully sleepy eyes, filled up with a spark of the truth he won’t say aloud. A look passes between them, not so fleeting that Marty can’t catch it, and he wonders how much this woman knows—about Carcosa, about that night with Wren Dufresne, about Rust paring down his beers to something mild and cutting out the cigarettes altogether. About the little house in Louisiana with a garden that only grew when Rust willed it into life, about a red Ford sitting in the driveway every morning and every night, about the little girl named for a hardy-blooming flower. About the two of them broken and mended back into the cloth of one another. About everything.

But whether she knows it or not Rebecca doesn’t say, and Marty watches her while she works behind the bar, pouring drinks for the two patrons further down and tinkering with the ice machine. Her hands and chest are freckled over enough that it makes her complexion seem darker than it really is, though there’s no ring of any kind on her unpainted fingers. She looks a small handful of years younger than Rust, maybe, with fine lines around her eyes and mouth but nothing that makes her look hard-worn or ragged.

She’s pretty, Marty decides for himself, in a modest way that isn’t exactly striking. Like the sun-tanned gals back in his rodeo days who sat slouched and squinting on their barrel horses to watch the broncos run, flyaway hair tied and braided back with callouses on their hands and sterling jewelry catching light in the sun.

When their beers are mostly drained down to the last few swigs and the jukebox has gone through a round of Johnny Cash and Springsteen and Mellencamp, Rebecca motions from the swinging saloon doors leading into to the kitchen behind the bar.  

“Believe you’ve got a package waiting in the back,” she says, only barely winking. “And I seem to recall an IOU note for yours truly.”

The floor creaks under Rust’s weight as he slides off his stool and moves around the bar, looking over his shoulder to coax Marty into following. “You didn’t have any trouble with postal?” he asks, stepping through the doors after the smaller woman with Marty close behind.

“Worse things have been put through the mail, honey,” Rebecca says with a soft snort. “And no, everything was right as rain as far as I can tell.” She leads them through the modest but clean kitchen into a little room off to the side, small enough that it was probably a pantry or closet before it was converted into an office. She flips the light and leans over into a filing cabinet to pull a yellow envelope out, the same one Rust mailed out of Louisiana three weeks prior.

Two small bundles done up in bubble wrap and butcher paper slide out into Rust’s hands, and he wordlessly passes one over to Marty before tearing into his own. Within a few moments both men have their respective pocketknives unwrapped, and by the time Marty’s done inspecting his own Rust has already hidden his away in some deft sleight of hand trick.

“Y’all planning on doing some hunting up north?” Rebecca asks, perching on the edge of the battered wooden desk wedged into one side of the room. “Might need something more than a couple knives. I can get you more supplies, you think you need it.”

“Naw, no hunting,” Rust says, gently brushing past Marty to walk out into the open kitchen to hitch one hand up on his hip. “Likely just some fishing down on the river, but I figure we ought to be as prepared as best we can. Pick up some bear spray once we get into Fairbanks.”

Marty feels a slight grimace tighten across his face at that thought, boot heels scuffing on the floor as he follows Rust into the kitchen. “How often do you stumble across bears up there, this time of year?”

“They’ll be gearing up for the winter all this month and next,” Rust says, reaching for the inner pocket of his coat to pull out a plain white envelope. “So it’s more’n likely we’ll catch sight of one out foraging somewhere. Just need to keep a good distance and tread careful, though we ought to be on the lookout for moose more than any bear.”

He waits for Rebecca to join them back in the kitchen before passing the envelope into her hand, and she doesn’t open it up to thumb through the bills but Marty knows there’s a few hundred dollars cash sealed inside.

“Think you should be mostly set up there,” Rebecca says, folding the envelope in half before slipping it under her vest and untucked shirt to rest against the small of her back. “Electricity and water’s running steady, got some wood stacked up out back for the fireplace. Put my sister on the phone and made sure you’d be set on fresh linens, plenty of blankets for the bed, few other simple things if you need it. Only thing you’d be wanting for is any food and drink you fancy on keeping while you stay. Fridge isn’t much but it’d be fine for the two of you, I think.”

Marty makes silent note that she skimmed right over the single bed part without tripping through her words, feeling himself warm up a bit at the mere thought of Rust having a word or two to impart on that.

“M’sure it’ll be more than enough,” is all Rust says, features softening out as he slants a hip against the stainless counter topped with a basket of lemons. “I do appreciate all your help, Miss Rebecca. Tell your sister likewise if you get the chance.”

“Oh shoot, don’t you keep on with all that _Miss Rebecca_ nonsense,” she says, though there seems to be a touch of pinkness shining behind the freckles on her face. “Least I could do for an old friend in need of some time off.”

Back in the bar, another man is just then walking through the door with a sack of what looks like potatoes slung over one shoulder, his free hand carting a canvas tote full of brown grocery bags. He looks Rust and Marty over behind a pair of spindly glasses as he passes by, only stopping to turn when he spies Rebecca walking back out behind the counter.

“This the southern company you’ve been talking about?” he asks, and at Rebecca’s nod he inclines his head a bit, watching them over the tops of his glasses this time. “In that case, pleasure to have you folks. Name’s Webster.”

They exchange a few greeting words and then the man takes leave and disappears into the kitchen, letting the saloon doors swing shut behind him. Rebecca makes a wry face and lowers her voice to incline toward Marty, long braid sloping down over her shoulder. “We usually keep Webster in the back for good reason. He’ll whip up a good supper for y’all later, though, if you wanna wait the hour before we ring the dinner bell.”

Outside the bar window, daylight is already slowly circling the drain, hanging by one finger on the horizon. Rust can see the edge of a wooden streetlight shining and goes to shoulder his duffel from where it’d been hidden behind the bar.

“That’d be fine,” he says. “Me and Marty can go bed down in one of the inns uptown for the night, settle in and then be back here in an hour or so.” He glances at his and Marty’s boots for a moment, briefly edging his teeth along his bottom lip before looking back up at Rebecca. “I don’t imagine the old crew’s up north pulling trout this season.”

Rebecca blinks at that, voice suddenly edging into something more hesitant. “Well—no,” she says, tucking her hands into her jean pockets. “Bunchy and the boys are in town right now. Not sure where they’re holing up, I haven’t seen them in a few days now.”

“Mmm, alright.” Rust seems to mull that over for a second before hoisting up another suitcase and passing it over into Marty’s hands. “We’ll be back around for supper then, I reckon, so long as it isn’t any trouble.”

“Course it isn’t,” Rebecca scoffs, following them toward the door where the bar’s other two patrons turn to watch them leave. She stands on the stoop and then pulls a key off the clip on her belt, tossing it in the air for Rust to catch. “You can take that old golf cart up town for a spell, nobody’s gonna give a damn so long as you don’t park in the middle of the street.”

Rust palms the key and squints up at her, silhouetted against the light coming from inside the bar. “You got Billy Moon on the phone yet?” she asks. “He might be in bed already, early a riser as he is.”

“I’ll give him a call at the inn,” Rust says, and then gives Rebecca a short wave as he and Marty tread through the dirt lot over to the old cart. “We’ll be back after while.”

Driving in the near dark with the wind blowing cold against them, Marty’s still trying to take in the sight and the smell of the place, foreign as it is around every new angle. They pass another bar and a smoke shop advertising pipe tobacco with what looks like an old Indian Chief carved from wood standing vigil out front, base chained to a lock on the sidewalk.

“Billy Moon?” he asks, looking over at Rust.

“Yeah,” Rust says, taking a side street between two buildings in lieu of turning left on the main road. “The man getting us up to Fairbanks in the morning.”

“He your travel agent?” Marty says, laughing softly around his own joke.

“Might as well be,” Rust says, eyes glinting a little under the yellow lamps they pass underneath. There’s a red and blue-lit sign a few blocks ahead, and Marty can’t read what it says yet but it looks as surefire as any neon beacon he’s ever seen. “He’s the one helped me get on a plane down to Texas when I joined the service at eighteen.”

Marty counts back in his head, trying to pick out the decade when that might’ve been. “Jesus,” he finally says. “He must be getting on in years now.”

“Billy’s one of those old crows you halfway expect to live forever,” Rust says, something gone a little far-off in his voice. “For all I fuckin’ know, he just might. Nothing’s managed to kill him yet.”

“Sounds familiar,” Marty says, more to himself than to Rust, and it isn’t until the other man clears his throat that he realizes he said it aloud.

Rust only nods toward the old building ahead, sashed windows alight from within like gold teeth peeking out at them between brick molars. “This is the place.”

The neon tubing spelling out the building’s namesake reads _The Alaskan Star_ in fluorescent blue, with a red moonbeam cut straight out of a different era underneath. Ashort statue of what looks like a grizzly stands by the front door, holding a little lantern in one extended paw. Marty squints at it for a moment before letting out a soft chuckle, still slumped in the passenger side of the golf cart with his hands already going numb from cold. “We’re in one of them Hallmark movies for real, now.”

Rust parks the borrowed cart off to the side of the inn, already swinging out to start collecting their bags in the blue dark. “There’s about a fifty-fifty split across the state as a whole,” he says, boots crunching through the gravel lot. “Half of it looks like backcountry mud slum and the rest is pulled right off a Kinkade Christmas card. Reckon we’ll see a little bit of both while we’re here.”

Marty hefts his own bag down off the cart and squints at the other man even though it’s dark. “Here I’d been thinking the only reason you’d know the name Thomas Kinkade is on account of that ugly-ass puzzle still in the plastic in the guest room.”

“Even so,” Rust says, and if Marty were looking he might catch the edge of a white smile at the corner of his mouth. “You ain’t thrown it out yet.”

“I was planning on rehoming it,” Marty grumbles, but follows Rust up the front steps and into the Alaskan Star’s yellow-lit foyer. The source of light is a small chandelier hanging by a chain from the ceiling, decorated with what looks like a star-shaped Christmas ornament that somebody hung on one of its brass arms.

The clerk behind the counter is an older man, white-haired and wrapped up in a red tartan coat with one arm of his eyeglasses threaded through the first buttonhole. He stands from his chair while a small TV drones below on the desk, one hand snaking around to lower the volume. “Help you gentlemen?”

“Just one room for the night, if you could,” Rust says, pulling his wallet from an inner coat pocket. “We’re passing through and should be out by first light in the morning.”

The old man slips his spectacles on the end of his nose before glancing up at them. “Two queens, I take it?”

Marty tries in vain to keep his face from creasing up into a pinched smile but Rust only nods and slants his gaze downward as he scrawls a name into the guest ledger. “That’ll do it.”

He takes the brass key the innkeeper slides across the counter and palms it after paying, giving a short nod before turning to tread across the faded foyer rug. There’s a star hanging from his palm at one end of the keychain and Marty watches it as they slowly ascend the wooden stairs one after the other, passing frames and an old silverback mirror nailed into the wall.

“This place ain’t very accessible for people who can’t take the goddamn stairs,” he says with a half-winded sigh, hoisting a suitcase up onto the first landing. “Christ, how many floors up are we?”

“Reckon it’s been here since the 40’s or so,” Rust says from a few steps above, starting to sound a little ragged himself. “If you can’t leg it up they’d probably put you in a room on the ground floor.”

“Sounds like a lawsuit,” Marty says, and then catches glimpse of the maroon rug on the second landing, stretching down the long hall with its shabby woven roses. “This better not be any weird horror movie shit. If there’s a maze out back we’re turning high tail and leaving.”

Rust huffs out something that might be a ghosting laugh, though he’s already headed down the hall and counting brass numbers on the doors. “Here we go,” he says when they get to number eight, and then jimmies the key in the lock until the wooden door swings open.

The room inside is pleasantly cramped once they manage to twist on the light, a little like something Marty recalls from the brighter corners of childhood summers spent on his uncle’s ranch. He’d bunked in the attic room by choice, and the tight walls and old quilts had always been more like a comfort than anything stifling. Here, the close softness of the old room feels like a warm refuge from the cold.

Sure enough, there are two queen beds done up in matching duvets with a single nightstand wedged like an errant elbow between them. An old furnace whirs from underneath the sashed window, ticking and creaking as it churns out heat. Marty walks further into the room and stands at the foot of the two beds before dropping one of the heavier bags in his hand to the floor. His eyes slowly pan from left to right as his jaw works, idly pondering the newness of a situation where there’s finally more than one bed to go around.

He looks over as Rust shuts the door and thuds further into the room, busy shucking his coat off and pulling up something on his phone. “What d’you reckon we needed two beds for?”

It sounds stranger in the air than it did in his head, not that he’d thought very long before blurting those words out like something a child would ask. Marty feels his face go hotter when Rust’s sleepy eyes glance up from his phone to look between the beds. “Just so you could stand there and pine like a kicked dog,” he says, mouth twitching on one side. “Like you don’t know any better.”

“Know what?” Marty mumbles as he sheds his own jacket, and then watches Rust throw his coat and duffel across the bed furthest from the rattling heater.

“ _Better_ ,” Rust says again, and then reaches out to slip two fingers in the other man’s jeans pocket, seamlessly moving toward the unoccupied bed and pulling Marty down on it with him. They fall in an awkward heap with a bark of startled laughter from Marty, who turns to throw an arm across Rust’s stomach.

“You only want me in your bed because I run hot,” he teases, slowly scooting further up the mattress when he feels Rust touch the back of his hand. “Simple as that.”

“Maybe a few more reasons that that,” Rust says when they’re lying side by side, flat on their backs with the paneled ceiling overhead. He turns his face toward Marty with closed eyes, recalling the memory of them in the kitchen from earlier in the day though it seems so distant now that he might’ve dreamed it. “Here I thought I was the one keeping you warm at night.”

They’re both tired, worn and weary from a long day of traveling as far as they’ve come, but the lines in Rust’s face are lax and softened into something peaceful here in the dim light. It doesn’t take much deciding for Marty to lean into his warmth and kiss him.

Rust doesn’t start or even open his eyes, content enough to let their breath mingle for a long moment until he presses his lips back against Marty’s in kind, soft and with the familiar brush of whiskers. “Don’t let me nod off,” he says almost drowsily, and Marty feels halfway drunk off something himself. “We’ve still got to get back to Chinook’s for mess hour…n’ call Billy Moon. Man goes to bed with the hen house.”

“Set an alarm for a half-hour,” Marty says, feeling his body sink further into the soft bed as his eyes slide shut. “Still got time before supper.”

He drifts for a few minutes, listening to the sound of Rust’s voice somewhere close by, catching a few loose words here or there like moths in the air. And then a body pressing along his side, Rust’s voice low in his ear now. “All set for tomorrow morning,” he says. “Gotta be at the field by sunup.”

“Okay, babe,” Marty mumbles, and uses his last thought to wrap an arm around Rust’s shoulders before slipping off into the pull of sleep.  
  


* * *  
  


It’s even colder now that the sun has settled down for bed, the darkness so blue-black and solid that it almost feels like they’re moving through ink. The stars aren’t as bright here as they are further north but Rust can still pick out the brightest ones like white diamonds, his eyes moving between the street and the horizon as they steer the borrowed golf cart back to Chinook’s.

Marty’d found his knit hat and slipped it on before they left, and with his salt and pepper beard and broad hands he looks akin to a crewman fit to work a boat with the best of them. This is something Rust turns over in the back of his mind when they pull into the bar’s lot and find a new row of pickup trucks and somebody’s old Bronco wedged together in a shabby lineup, already telling him who’s set up shop for a hearty round of drinking inside.

“Looks like the joint’s livened up some,” Marty says, sitting forward a bit as Rust parks back under the scrubby tree. He stays quiet for a moment, eyes wandering along the line of trucks until they land on the black lift kit pickup with cracked lettering across the tailgate. “ _The Wild Bunch_ ,” Marty reads, squinting through the dark before letting out a crude laugh. “Damn. Thought we’d left the redneck royalty down south.”

“That’d be Bunchy Collins,” Rust says, sighing as he leans out of the cart and stands in the yellowed pool of light coming from the nearest lamp post. Both hands hitch up on his hips before he glances toward the ground, tilting his face toward Marty’s boots. “You still got your knife on you?”

Marty stiffens, eyes flashing in the dark. “Why do you ask?”

“Probably safe to say I don’t have many friends left in Juneau outside Rebecca and old Billy,” Rust says, turning to look at him. “You might feel better with it, is all I’m sayin’. Even though they’d have to get through me first if they felt inclined to stir something up.”

“Now we both know there’s more to it that you ain’t telling,” Marty says, stepping closer. His eyes dart over to the bar’s entrance and then back to Rust. “And a knife isn’t worth shit in a gunfight, no matter how good a stick you are. I for one don’t much feel like pressing any luck we got left.”

Rust sniffs and drags a boot through the graveled dirt. “They already know we’re here. Matter of fact, I bet somebody’s been holding lookout since they caught word I’d be coming back.”

“So?” Marty snorts. “You don’t owe anybody a homecoming call if you don’t feel like it.”

“Maybe not,” Rust says, and then starts off at a walk toward the entrance. “C’mon.”

Marty swears under his breath but quickly follows, squaring up his shoulders and turning a heavier heel into his walk before they even get within spitting distance of the door. The past reminds him that he’s never been much good at this, toeing up when he was supposed to be playing into a part, and that Rust could still run circles around all the attempts he ever made at any game of poker that didn’t involve cards.

“Damn it, Rust,” Marty hisses when he sets foot down on the bottom step of the stoop, but Rust is already hauling the door open and letting the din of barroom drinking pour out into the night.

There’s no fanfare or welcome when they walk inside, but a good ten or twelve pairs of eyes swivel over from the crowded side of the bar now holding the jukebox hostage. Rust nods at them without really looking at any one man in particular, and the only thing he gets back in return are Rebecca’s clandestine attempts to catch his eye from where she’s posted behind the bar with a tequila bottle in hand.

Her eyes burn a trail to a table set with two chairs on the emptier side of the barroom, and Marty sends up a silent prayer of relief when Rust heads in that direction instead of straight into the fray of men still watching them over tall beers and tables scattered with empty shot glasses.

The juke is pacing itself through an old Creedence hit and Marty pulls his chair a little to one side, making sure he can still see the whole room from one eye while the men slowly pick back up the murmur of their conversation. Rust shrugs out of his coat and drops into his own seat, knees spread and elbows already on the table. He’s got that old look on his face like he wants somebody to try and dare him into something, and Marty knows right then he’s going to need another drink or three before the night comes to a close.

“You know anybody over there?” he asks, being careful not to move or gesture in the group’s direction when he does.

“Yeah,” Rust says, slowly lacing his fingers in front of his mouth so Marty’s eyes draw right to the gold glint of his ring. “A good few.”

Marty’s brows quirk up higher on his forehead. “We gonna have any problems just sittin’ here minding our own?”

Rust’s eyes cut low and over to the bar before looking back at Marty. “Probably not,” he says, masking over his features with something sleepy again. “But then again, we wouldn’t be the ones starting it.”

They both look up when Rebecca sets a bowl of peanuts down on their table, back turned to the rest of the bar. “I didn’t know Bunchy and the boys would be coming out tonight or I probably would’ve warned you off,” she says, biting into her bottom lip for a moment. “You two still wanna stick around for a bite to eat?”

“Might as well,” Rust says. “Most everything else will probably be closing up for the night. Marty?”

“Whatever you wanna do,” Marty says, leaning back in his creaking chair to look between them. “Reckon I’m still a bystander in all this.”

Rust’s eyes cut over at that, bow of his mouth pulled into something stern, but it’s come and gone inside the next blink of an eye. He looks back up at Rebecca instead with an open expression. “What’s on the house menu tonight?”

“Shepherd’s pie and cheesesteak, clam chowder if you want something warm to fill you up,” Rebecca says, hitching her hands back up on her hips. “Webster can cook up a few burgers if you’d rather have that, potato skins, some run-of-the-mill bar fare. Beer on draft, Coke products, coffee and tea.”

Once she’s disappeared through the kitchen doors with their order, Marty narrows his eyes to peer over at the man sitting across from him. Rust looks back beneath heavy lids, deadpan enough that he rouses a little laugh out of Marty. “What?”

“Oh, nothing,” Marty snorts, reaching forward to palm a few peanuts out of the bowl. He husks a few out of the shell and pops them into his mouth. “I’m just perpetually amazed, is all, that you probably got beef with some motherfucker on all four corners of the godforsaken earth.”

Rust’s lip twitches the barest bit, eyes cast somewhere at the neon beer signs nailed along the wall. “You surprised? We worked together at CID for seven years.”

The sentiment there remains mostly unspoken, but Marty doesn’t have to pry any further to know what he means. When Rust walked out of the parking lot with blood on his face, there wasn’t anybody there who wanted to stop him.

“Kathleen always liked you,” Marty says anyhow, like that could be any reconciliation, eyes dropped to his hands spread across the scarred tabletop. He mulls it over for a second before looking back up with a tiny crease drawn between his eyes. “I just don’t know why you can’t ever play nice with the other boys.”

Rust’s mouth pulls into a short-lived frown that passes as a roll of his shoulders. “Probably on account of I don’t make it a priority to buy into other people’s bullshit,” he says. “Whether that’s some fabricated social hierarchy or anything to do with another man’s personal fucking politics.”

“Well shit,” Marty laughs. “It’s no secret you were never too big on dealing with higher authority.”

“It ain’t about authority, man. It’s about not playing their games.”

“Uh-huh,” Marty says, bracing his chin against his palm. “That must be why we rolled up in here like Butch and Sundance earlier, whole place sitting there waiting on the other shoe to drop. I halfway thought we were gonna have to cut and run.”

Rust sinks down lower in his chair, legs spreading even wider under the table so their knees brush. “Might be easier to say that most people just don’t like me, Marty. But you already knew that.”

“Well I like you plenty enough, and maybe even a little more than that,” Marty says, squaring his jaw up. He tries to pull a few other names loose and finds himself strapped and scrambled enough that only one other one comes to mind. “And Rebecca? If I didn’t know any better I’d say she’s probably got something sweet pinned on you, so don’t you go starting up that mess. Plenty of folks like you—once they get to know you.”

Marty isn’t expecting the slant of Rust’s eyebrows at the mention of Rebecca’s name, but a question seems to hang around the other man’s mouth when he does. “Rebecca,” he repeats. “What makes you think that?”

“Hell if I know,” Marty says, even if part of him does know, trying not to fidget in his seat or with the cardboard coasters on their table. “Just seems like y’all got a history, is all.”

Rust only hums to himself, nodding a bit, and the tilt of his eyes warn Marty that the woman in question is on her way back to their table before the thud of her boots does.

“Some drinks for you, honeys,” she says, smiling warmly. “Dinner’ll be out in ten or so.”

She sets two tall glasses of water down before pairing them with one pale-colored ale apiece. Rust reaches for his water first, taking a few long swigs before he even touches the rim of the beer glass. Across the room the jukebox switches over to The Doors and then there’s the telltale scrape of a chair pushing back across the floor.

Marty knows there’s somebody coming up on him from behind but doesn’t turn to look, only keeps his posture loose and his eyes trained on Rust, who watches the newcomer with his face painted neutral but one hand kept under the table on his knee.

“Well I’ll be tied and damned, if it ain’t old Rusty himself,” a new voice calls out, heralded by footfalls heavier than Rebecca’s were. “Last time I saw you, you weren’t even hardly fit enough for the cat to drag in. We were all bettin’ on how long it’d take you to follow that old man of yours out into high country and not come back.”

“Harvey,” Rust says, leaving the name hanging by itself in the air, and when Marty looks to his left he finds their company standing unsteadily in badly laced work boots with a hunter-orange jacket hanging open around his shoulders. His face is ruddy and unshaven enough that it almost looks dirty in the low light, and the sweaty smell of booze rolls off him like running headfirst into a brick wall.

“Damn skippy,” Harvey says, clapping his hands together before looking down at Marty. “And who n’ the hell is this?”

“Martin Hart,” Marty says, looking up with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. He doesn’t extend a hand but he suspects Harvey wouldn’t have reached for it even if he had.

“Marty Harty, huh?” Harvey says, ogling at them before his face pinches up into thought. “Ain’t seen you working on the docks. You new in town? Little too long in the tooth to be a greenhorn.”

“We’re just passing through on our way toward Fairbanks,” Rust says, stepping in with his tone clean-cut. “Got some business to tend to up there.”

“That so?” Harvey squints at him from the corner of his eye, mouth pursed up into something passing for thoughtful. When his eyes find the gold on Rust’s left hand the air seems to waver around them and Marty feels his stomach drop all the way down into the soles of his boots.

Harvey laughs high and loud before turning to call over his shoulder at some of the other men watching behind them. “Hey Raz,” he hollers, “didn’t queers getting married just pass here last week?”

“Shore did,” the one named Raz calls back, and when Harvey turns back to look at them his face has curled up into something that looks meaner.

“Well then,” he says. “What kinda business did y’all say you were on, again?”

Rust only blinks at him, slow and sleepily. “Surely not anything you’d feel the need to make implications about, Harvey.”

“Who said I was making any _implications_ , Cohle,” Harvey says, and now the room around them has gone a touch quieter again. “Here I thought I was just basing shit off what we already all knew.”

There’s something faintly sizzling from the kitchen and Rust can see a figure standing still and silent behind the saloon doors, keeping watch. He nods and Marty tries not to twitch, though he feels like he’s waiting on a split hair trigger for Rust’s signal to move.

“I’ll tell you what I do know, Harvey,” Rust says, just loud enough for his voice to carry across the room. “I know how your end of things wound up the last time you went whipping your prick out where it didn’t belong. Part of me was hoping past experience might’ve colored your ideas a little brighter on that.”

The other men behind him are still seated and Harvey spreads his feet further apart, like it might ground him better through the fog of alcohol. “That’s what you know, huh?”

“Mmm,” Rust says, tilting his head to the side, eyes still whetted sharp as blue stone. “I also happen to know where Miss Rebecca keeps her twelve gauge in the back, so y’all get on back to your drinks and have a good time.”  
  
Harvey stiffens up like an old yard dog, bristling there in front of them. “You threatening me, Cohle?”

“No,” Rust says, giving one solemn shake of his head. “Just telling you what I know.”

The silence that stretches between them is long and harsh, enough that Marty finally feels the bead of sweat where it’s gathered hot and sticky between his shoulders. He thinks about how a younger shadow of himself would’ve already knocked the table over and taken out two of Harvey’s teeth on the downswing, but here and now he only feels tired and old and a few other things he can’t seem to place. There’s some regret in there, some pride—most of that tied to Rust in more than just a few ways, though he knows without a doubt that they wouldn’t walk clean out of a fight with a bar full of fishermen pitted against them.

“In that case,” Harvey finally says, and this time any of the drunken comedy in his voice has been replaced with a threat that rings clear down to the bone. “I’ll tell you what I know, Cohle—and it’s along the lines of you two being cleared out of Juneau by noon tomorrow. For good.”

“Lucky for you,” Rust says, “we’d already planned to be on the road by sunup.”

“See that you are,” Harvey murmurs, and then lets his eyes dawdle on Marty before he turns and trudges back to the other side of the bar, leaning a little off to one side as he goes.

The man named Bunchy Collins sits back and watches them for the rest of the night, smoking his way through a pack of cigarettes and dropping the butts into the bottom of an empty beer bottle. He doesn’t get up or call over to them, only watches Rust with one eye turned on them like a spyglass, knowing full well that there’s another eye turned on him in kind.

  
  


Rebecca pulls them back into the kitchen after supper, waving off Webster with a hand that doesn’t do much of anything to keep him from coming over. He stands a few steps behind her while she tucks a few loose strands of dishwater blonde behind her ears, peeling the skin off a potato in one long spiral.

“We were watching here from the kitchen,” Rebecca says, blowing out a tired sigh. “Half the time that crowd shows up we got one hand on the phone and the other on daddy’s old sawed-off. There’s never any telling, the shit those boys are gonna get up to.”

“Seemed pretty tame tonight,” Rust says, sniffing some. “Just hope they don’t give you any trouble for it when we’re gone.”

“They won’t,” Webster says, picking up a new potato off the counter to start peeling. “But I’ll walk y’all out when you go to leave in case they got plans otherwise.”

Rust nods his thanks, body held close to Marty’s side. “We can catch a ride back to the inn uptown.”

“Bullshit, I can take you,” Rebecca says, hand gone to the key ring hanging at her belt. “You’re staying at the Star? That’s only three or four minutes up the road, I’ll be back in no time.”

“That’s real kind of you, ma’am,” Marty says, glancing at Rust in profile, “but we can’t ask you to go out so late—”

“Folks around here know not to mess with me, sugar,” Rebecca says, smiling up at him. “And I’d be more than happy to, so let’s get a move on so y’all can sleep enough to put up with Billy Moon’s rooster crowing in the morning.”

She rattles her key ring and disappears over by the office for a brief moment, coming back around the corner with one arm already through her parka sleeve. “High ho, through the side door here. Web’ll keep a lookout.”

The temperature out in the lot has seemed to plummet thirty degrees since they were last outside, and despite the bowl of hot soup in his stomach Rust still clenches his teeth against the bitter cold. Their breath fogs through the air as Rebecca leads the way back to her little cart, kicking through gravel and the odd cigarette butt as she goes.

Marty feels like he’s barely spoken a handful of words all night, most of his curiosity still coiled up in a few knots worth untying. Rust keeps quiet and wrapped up in his coat, chin tucked beneath the collar while a wet wind blows in off the water.

“How long have you lived here in Juneau?” Marty asks, just a step or two behind Rebecca. “Seem to the know the people and the place like the back of your hand.”

“Oh, I’ve been here in Juneau since I was about twenty or so,” she says, sliding into the driver seat of the open cart. “Grew up further north in a little coastal town—Nome, sure you’ve heard of it.”

Marty nods, thinking that’s probably one of three cities on the Alaskan map that he can name and point in the general ballpark of. “Didn’t they base some movie off that place? Just a few years ago.”

“Uh-huh,” Rebecca says with a laugh, steering back out onto the road. “The Fourth Kind, they called it. All that flying saucer business people dream up.”

Rust’s voice is edged with something titled funny on one side when he speaks. “I’m surprised you haven’t spun out a yarn about being abducted by a UFO—reckon it’d explain a thing or two.”

“You hush up,” Rebecca says, throwing out a hand to slap him against the side. “As a matter of fact, I don’t believe in any of it. Never did, not even when I was a girl.”

“How do you figure so many people up there go missing without a trace?” Marty asks, looking between the two of them, silhouettes briefly lit up as they pass beneath a streetlamp.

Rebecca’s quiet for a few moments, and when she makes another turn the motel’s neon shooting star can be seen up ahead. “Alaska’s a big place,” she says. “A lot of people come up here to get lost when they don’t wanna be found. And even if they do, sometimes there’s nothing that can help them—animals and the elements will make sure of that.”

She doesn’t add anything else on the matter, and Marty doesn’t have much left to ask as they roll up in front of the inn’s familiar face. The bear statue is still standing vigil out front, its little lantern now lit up gold from within.

Rebecca stays seated behind the wheel, watching Rust and Marty walk around to her side of the cart. She watches them for a long moment, soft mouth pulling up so a dimple shines in one cheek, and then shakes her head.

“I’ll tell you what, Rustin Cohle,” she says. “I never thought I’d see you again, but Lord knows I’m glad I did. And I’m sure glad you didn’t come back up here alone.”

Rust clears his throat, looking down at his boots before glancing off somewhere to the side. He vaguely nods, mouth flattened out into a firm line. “Probably wouldn’t have ever come back if it weren’t for Marty.”

There’s more to that than he could ever bear to tell her, probably. But for everything he doesn’t say, she only nods and ducks her head away for a moment before looking back up at the both of them.

“Well, I’d better get on back before the boys burn the place to the ground,” Rebecca says. “You two be safe and enjoy your time, now that you’ve got it. Take some time to stop and smell the roses. I might be some biased old homebody but I don’t think there’s a finer place to see on the earth.”

When she holds out a hand Rust reaches over to take it, briefly squeezing before letting go. There's a key in his palm when he draws it back to himself. “Take care, Miss Rebecca.”

“You’d better be glad I’ve been too busy to whip you for saying that,” she says, sniffling just a bit. “Maybe next time.”

“Maybe next time,” Rust echoes, not knowing whether there’s any truth to it or not, and then she winks at the both of them before shuttling back off into the cold night.

They stand together to watch the cart disappear around the corner before Rust huffs out a white cloud of breath. “I always forget how cold it us up here.”

“I’ll warm you up some,” Marty says, nudging him a little in the side. The stars above them are bright and gathered like shards of crystal in Rust’s eyes. “C’mon.”

  
  
  
  


The heater under the window takes two kicks with the toe of Marty’s boot before it starts rumbling again, coughing out a belch of hot air from the vent in the floor.

“Thank fuck,” he mumbles, finally moving to shed out of his heavy coat. Rust is perched on the edge of the bed holding their bags, pulling his cell charger out of a zippered pocket and plugging it into the phone. “You wanna shower up real quick or should I take the first one?”

“Go on ahead,” Rust says, bending at the waist to start pulling the laces on his boots. “I’ll get the bed turned down.”

Once Marty has cranked up the shower in the tiny bathroom, Rust shrugs out of his jacket and lays it across the bed. He’s still cold enough that his hands fumble a little with the zippers on their bags, but he digs around until he finds the few bundles of underclothes Marty had packed in one corner of his suitcase. He lays out a pair of shirts and some boxer shorts then fishes around until he finds his old dryer-spun sweatpants, gone soft as cashmere to the touch.

The inn had been quiet all through the hall and up the stairs, and they hadn’t seen anybody but the old keeper on the way up, still stationed at his desk with two doughnuts and a cup of hot coffee. Here in the room sounds seems muffled under the spell of something cramped and soft, like they’ve been cocooned up in the heavy folds of a quilt.

There’s a small familiarity in it that Rust can’t quite place. Gold light spilling from the lamp wedged between two beds reminds him of home, even though his real tether to anything called home is only behind the bathroom door. And maybe that’s it, Rust thinks—how strange it is that he feels like he’s been here with Marty before.

His mind still sometimes likes to relay memory painted over with the haze of something unreal, though. Layers of light and color and sound that were only ever a frayed nerve ending in his head, playing a crooked game of connect the dots. That’s all the feeling is, Rust knows, and pushes it out of mind before it gets the chance to overstay its welcome.

Marty walks out of the bathroom in a billow of steam a minute later, towel wrapped around his waist with a few drops of water still clinging to his arms. “Ain’t you sweet,” he says when he spies his nightclothes waiting for him on the bed, padding across the room to start getting dressed. He laughs around a yawn, pulling the shirt down over his head. “I wonder if that old geezer downstairs would run a turndown service if we called the desk. Rosehip soap and little chocolate mints on the pillows.”

“Maybe if you asked real nicely,” Rust says without any real heat, peeling off his flannel overshirt on his way to the bathroom. “Probably upcharge us on sheer insult alone.”

“Well hurry up in there and get out before I fall asleep on you,” Marty says, shuffling over to sit on the edge of the bed to stretch his knee out with a grimace. “Feel like I been hit by a damn train.”

Rust makes quick work of lathering up and rinsing in the shower, only staying underneath the spray to let the hot water beat against his neck and shoulders until his skin has gone broiled pink. The muscles there are stiff and sore but the heat eases some of the tension out, letting it ebb and swirl down the drain between his feet.

Back in the bedroom proper, Marty is flipping over to a new page in the paperback he brought on the plane. He sets it down and takes his reading glasses off as soon as Rust is dressed, scooting to the other side of the bed to leave the warm spot free.

“Turn that light out real quick, babe,” he drowses aloud before flopping down against his pillow. “I can’t move no more.”

The light bathes over the room in sudden blackness and Rust slides into bed by touch, shivering a little as the soles of his bare feet skim across the sheets. He can’t see Marty beyond a dark outline but feels him pulling the heavy duvet further up over their hips before hunkering back down again. It doesn’t take them long to get comfortable, having long since figured out the routine of crawling into bed together whether one was already asleep or not.

“You still cold?” Marty says just above a whisper, though he doesn’t wait for an answer before reaching out to drape an arm over Rust’s middle.

“Little bit,” Rust says, and then presses his cold feet against the warmth of Marty’s legs, nearly grinning through the dark when the other man lets out a sharp hiss of breathless laughter.

“Every fucking time,” he says, though he doesn’t try to push Rust’s feet away and only scoots closer, near enough now that his nose is briefly pressing into Rust’s towel-dried hair. “Least you smell nice.”

“Must be that rosehip soap you got a hard-on for,” Rust teases, letting his eyes drift shut as the heater ticks in the corner. His body feels like it weighs a thousand pounds, sunk down here in this mattress like a lead weight to the bottom of an ocean. “Bed’s not so bad.”

Marty’s already halfway gone but that flicks a match in his head, something that’d been burning down a slow fuse ever since they first stepped into Chinook’s. “Speaking of bed,” he says, feeling Rust go stiller against him in something akin to anticipation. “Where’d you stay, before? When you were up here years ago.”

“Mmm,” Rust hums, trying to gather up his thoughts into a sleepy drawl. “Lotta different places. When you work the boats you sleep out on the water, of course. Sometimes I’d take some time and keep my own company out closer to the woods, but more often than not I bunked up somewhere behind a bar in whatever nook or cranny I could find. Simple living.”

“You—you ever stay with anybody else? When you weren’t on the boats.”

Rust breathes out a soft sigh, one foot moving beneath the blankets. “Not really. Never made a habit of it, at least.”

He stays quiet for a moment, voice coming back in where somewhere against the side of Marty’s face. “You must be turning something over in your head. Might as well come out and say it, Marty.”

“Well,” Marty starts, clearing his throat. “I was thinking—or I’d assumed, maybe. Shit, I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a prick, I was just curious is all.”

“’Bout what?”

Rust doesn’t have to be able to see to know Marty’s biting into his bottom lip, weighing out his next few words. “Did you and Rebecca used to have something going on?”

“We worked together for four or five years at Chinook’s, if that counts for something.”

“You know that’s not what I mean, hotshot. There was—something else. And I know I ain’t the sharpest nail in the box but tell me I’m not imagining shit.”

Rust only sighs, sagging back even more against his pillow. “Once. It was a more of a mistake than anything else. Didn’t ever happen again, if something’s got you smarting about it.”

“I ain’t smartin’ about nothing,” Marty blurts out quicker than he’d wanted, and then laughs a little to himself. “She’s a sweet gal—a good one, far as I can tell.”

“She is,” Rust admits. “She was. But I wasn’t worth much of anything at the time, outside being a warm body in her bed. We got drunk and there wasn’t anything loved or lost in the end, except an agreement to move past it.”

Marty follows the outline of Rust’s shoulder through the dark with both eyes and wets his bottom lip. “You’ve always been too damn hard on yourself. Just seeing the two of you talk after God knows how many years, anybody can see you meant something to her.”

“Well,” Rust says, gone quieter. “I didn’t want to promise her anything. I—couldn’t. I couldn’t promise anybody anything for…a long time, Marty.”

If there’s anything else hiding beneath that, he leaves it untouched and unspoken. Marty rolls the words over in his head, hearing a faint echo there like something ringing in the bottom of a stone well.

Or maybe a tunnel carved from bone and ash, he thinks, and the thought sends a shiver like a current through his body.

“Well you’ve promised me a damn good vacation, so I’m holding you to it,” he says, trying to chase some of the chill away. Rust’s hand presses up solid and warm somewhere against his ribcage and Marty leans closer, brushing a kiss somewhere along the other man’s jaw.

“Yeah,” Rust says, turning into it without much thought. He can’t help but smile when he feels a crooked kiss land against the side of his nose, and warmth turns over like a golden key in his gut. “Fuck, I’m glad you’re here with me.”

“Almost makes the cold worth it, huh?” Marty chuckles, turning over onto his back with Rust still wedged against his side. “Me too, babe. Still can’t hardly believe I’m sittin’ here in Alaska.”

“You will,” Rust says, and adds that to his list of promises before dropping a kiss of his own against Marty’s shoulder. “I’m gonna show you.”  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a dirty liar and I know it. I hope some of you can find it within your hearts to forgive me lol.
> 
> To make a long story short, the past ~five months of my life have felt like some of Hell's Greatest Hits and sitting down to write was neither an easy nor enjoyable task. But, my good friends, here we are: celebrating in the spirit of PROGRESS, even if that progress hasn't been rounded out in full just yet. (By God, we're gonna get there.)
> 
> I'm leaving you with half of the finale for now because I couldn't sit on it any longer without pulling my hair out. Alaska is a big shindig and some setup was hella necessary, but before I knew what hit me I had 50 pages of all this. Five more days of this redneck romance vacation still await us! And I have some beautiful things planned, I promise.
> 
> We shall meet again! Thanks for all your support and be well.


	35. alaska ||part two||

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "This is what I want to remember, you telling me that the stars hold their breath to hear the melt and magic of my voice at night. How you undressed me the very first time, stopping to ask what each tattoo meant, or for the minor tragedies behind every scar. Learning each other’s bodies. Me being constantly overwhelmed by the glorious landscape of you, your marshes and wilderness."
> 
> - **Anita Ofokansi** , _Elegy to Impermanence_  
> 

 

Rust wakes to a throbbing ache in his shoulder, the twinge of it timed along neat and steady with the familiar beat of his pulse. His mouth feels like raw cotton and it’s not until he opens his eyes that he realizes he’s still pressed into the concave parts of Marty like the two of them are adjacent puzzle pieces, and it’s not his own blood he hears but the thrum of someone else’s heart.

The bed was too soft to start and they’ll pay for that later, tangled up here with their creaking bodies just past the peak of mid-life, but Rust doesn’t think too much about that for the time being. He blinks against the cobalt darkness of the room and stretches his sore shoulder some, letting one palm smooth up Marty’s chest until it rises and falls with every breath. It takes a few more seconds than that until he remembers they’re in a hotel room in Alaska.

It’s only a quarter past three in the morning and the alarm isn’t set to ring until six. Marty is still fast asleep with Rust tucked up against him, warm and sleepy enough despite the fading pain in his cramped muscles, and that’ll do just fine for now. Neither one of them have any reason left to be in a hurry.

Rust closes his eyes and listens to Marty’s breathing while the old furnace groans and ticks under the window, almost like a third set of lungs in itself. They’re not folded inside four corners of a bedroom back in Louisiana, though Rust can remember a time when he first opened his eyes there, too, and didn’t know where he was. At least not until Marty snuffled awake and stirred in the bed next to him—and as surprising as that should’ve been, it was maybe the only thing left that made much sense at all.

There hadn’t been any surefire sign or signal for when it’d gone from Marty’s bedroom to something they shared in a mutual singularity. Rust lulls back along the edge of sleep and knows it had happened slowly, one little bit at a time, his dryer-warmed shirts hanging themselves in the closet and his watch and wallet gradually finding a home on the nightstand in lieu of where he’d been leaving them without king or country in odd spots around the house.

He hadn’t been the one to put them there, as far as he knows, and surely started out having every intention and more to get out of Marty’s hair the first moment it looked practical. But in the end somebody else’s intent had won out and Rust hadn’t found a good enough reason to move his shit back from where Marty placed it. Not the clothes from the closet, not his watch from the dresser. Not even himself from the offered side of another man’s bed.

A thousand and one miles away from a house and cozied right up next to what he calls home, Rust presses his nose into the soft material of Marty’s nightshirt and breathes in, slow and steady. It’d been too easy, in the beginning, letting himself stay with Marty. Nothing keeping him there but a matter of finally letting things stay put where they belonged.

But then again, maybe that had been the answer he’d been looking for all along.

  
  
  


The sunrise coming up from the east is something raw and Hellenic, rosy-fingered dawn and her watercolor fingers come to bleed shades of blush and amber over the snowcapped mountains. In Louisiana the mornings had always been touched with wet humidity, daybreak colors turned something sour and citrusy-sweet, but here it’s cold and dry enough that Rust thinks of other things—pinkish rock salt and pine sap, hard lye soap and the unshakeable smell of sweet wood rot.

Truth be told, some small part of him had missed it.

Marty is squinting off into the distance himself, though he’s since turned away from the sunrise to watch a battered old Chevy chug up from the dirt road that brought them here. They’re standing at the foot of a long tarmac with their bags dropped on the cracked pavement, and a windsock flapping in the cold wind is their only other companion outside the daily commotion coming from the neighboring sea docks.

“Hope that’s your man,” Marty says, holding a hand over his eyes. “Lest we freeze our balls off standing out here on this airstrip another goddamn second.”

Rust glances at the Chevy and knows exactly who it is without having to think twice. “You think this is cold, you got something else coming,” he says, even though he’s trying to bite back a shiver. “To think there ain’t even snow on the ground.”

“Fuckin’ wind chill,” Marty mutters, and then turns in a wide arc like something might’ve manifested behind them on the empty tarmac since he last checked. “You got any idea as to why we’re standing on an empty airstrip with no plane?”

“Was hoping we’d figure that out here in a second,” Rust says, slipping both hands into his coat pockets as the Chevy rolls to a gradual stop in front of them. There’s a white rabbit foot hanging from the rearview on a leather cord, probably more than a decade old, swinging there in a make-your-own-luck kind of charm. Both Rust and Marty watch fixedly as the truck’s door squeals open and a black cowboy boot steps down onto the tarmac.

The rest of the man seems to materialize in front of them until the full picture is standing long and lean at the side of his truck, hanging one bent arm on the open door. He’s old but by no means frail, probably already partway mummified into something long-lasting by the seaside cold and smoking two packs a day since he was seventeen.

Billy Moon tips his head to the side, making the turquoise-stoned band around the brim of his hat catch light from the early sun. The twin braids draped over his shoulders are gunmetal silver and long enough that they rustle some in the wind while the man himself squints at the pair of figures standing in front of him.  
  
“Well hell, son,” he says, calling out to Rust from where he’s leaning on the truck. “What possessed you two to stand out here on the goddamn strip?”

Rust takes a single step forward, one hand already hitched up on his hip. “You told us to meet you at the airfield come first light.” There’s a beat of silence, and Rust loosely gestures to the sun-cracked tarmac between them. “Here we’re standin’.”

“Did I say that?” Billy Moon asks, laughing like a crow as his boot heels scuff across the pavement. “Well, maybe I had a few too many sippers by the time you’d called—that’s a Thursday night for you.” He mimes tipping a beer can back bottoms-up, waggling his eyebrows. “But you ought to know how to read an old coot’s tracks in the sand by now.”

He finally bridges the few steps between them and reaches Rust first, leaning right in to clap him on the shoulder with a gloved hand. “It’s damn good to see you, sonny. Looking good, looking real good—cleaner-cut than I ever saw your daddy, that’s for sure.”

Rust almost smiles, leaning in to squeeze the old man’s shoulder in return. “We both know that wasn’t ever too hard a thing to manage,” he says. “Good to see you’re doing alright, Moony.”

“Better’n alright, son, considering I’m still alive and kicking,” Billy says, and then turns to Marty. “The one and only Martin, I take it?”

“Yes sir,” Marty says, reaching out to take the gloved hand he’s offered, a little bit dumbstruck in the face of such a living character. “From what I understand you’re something of a local legend around here.”

“Just an old haunt is all,” Billy says with a crooked laugh, showing off a gold tooth shining in the corner of his mouth. “You boys ready to get this show on the road? We ain’t gonna get up to Fairbanks by flapping our gums.”

Rust runs his teeth along his bottom lip, squinting at the empty space around them. “Been meaning to ask you, Billy, where the plane in question might’ve run off to.”

Marty sucks in a sharp breath that’s so cold it hurts, and the choking noise he makes doesn’t do much to disguise his snort of laughter. Rust doesn’t smile but he’s got that little glint in his eye, almost like a cat getting ready to catch the canary, mouth carefully pressed into a neutral line.

“Well shit,” Billy Moon says, throwing a hand out toward the fishing wharf across the way. “You ain’t ever heard of a sea plane before? Standing there acting like I up and gone senile—hell no, we’re taking her up off the water this morning.”

“A sea plane,” Rust says, blinking. “Since when?”

“Since we’re in the twenty-first century, you little wiseass,” Billy growls, and even if Marty immediately flashes to a hard-backed chair in Ken Quesada’s office with Rust sitting like a steel rod next to him, the old man’s words don’t bite and burn with any of the same old acid or contempt. There’s a fondness there, funnily enough—weatherworn and natural as the broken day rising around them.

“Well let’s get on over and fucking see it, then,” Rust says, shaking his head as he bends to shoulder his duffel from where it’d been lying on the tarmac. He doesn’t laugh outright but it’s a close thing, and that says a lot in itself. “For fuck’s sake.”

“Hop along then, boys,” Billy says, turning with a scuff of his boot heel to walk back over to the truck. He pats the hood and then slings an arm around the open door’s frame. “Gave up my good parking spot to come fetch y’all.”

Rust and Marty bundle and sling their bags into the bed of Billy’s old Chevy before climbing in behind them, settling down with their backs against the rear window.

“A sea plane,” Marty says, waiting until the engine coughs and rumbles. He looks sideways at Rust, legs stretched out long and straight in front of him. “Of all the things I’d imagine you’d be wanting to do, we’re taking off in a fuckin’ sea plane.”

“We were looking at an eighteen-hour drive if Billy hadn’t offered to fly,” Rust says, eyes on the flapping windsock as the truck turns back toward the road. He’s got half the mind to reach down in his shirt pocket and see if a pack of Camels have appeared there by way of magic. “Sea part might’ve taken me by surprise, but I’ll be alright.”

Marty cracks his jaw but takes that as it is. “Considering the stunt that shitheel at the bar pulled last night, guess I’m hoping this is the strangest part of the trip.”

Rust offers up one sage shake of his head, reaching into his inner pocket to touch the handle of his knife, almost like he’s checking to see if it’s still there. “Can’t be looking at it that way, Marty—that motherfucker ain’t worth the pot he doesn’t have to piss in. Besides, we got a long way to go yet.”

“Guess I’m thinking more along the lines of not wanting to cross paths with Bigfoot or nothing while I’ve got my pants around my knees, pissing up a tree.”

“Bigfoot ain’t real.”

“ _Yeah_ ,” Marty admits, making a vague gesture through the air, “but bears are.”

Rust smiles, then, as they drive over a divot in the road. “You and those bears, huh.”

Marty pushes his tongue along his bottom lip, shaking his head. “I don’t like the idea of it. Never have, but there ain’t exactly seven-foot grizzlies running around in Louisiana, and we don’t have to worry about it down there.”

“Already told you, I’ll pick up some bear spray before we do any real hiking out into the woods,” Rust says, and then cuts his eyes over. “Maybe we’ll see one.”

Marty barks out a crude laugh, kicking Rust’s boot with his own. “And you’ll see my ass, turning high tail and running for the hills.”

Billy’s truck rumbles out onto a road that leads into the fishing marina, the brisk smell of saltwater thick and heavy in the cold air. A few lone sea birds call out to one another from the docks where boats are anchored and idly swaying in the bobbing water. Further down the way they can see a blue-winged vessel moored and waiting, and Marty feels something tighten up in the pit of his stomach at the sight.

They swing down out of the truck once Billy rolls to a stop and cuts the engine, and Rust climbs over the tailgate before he drops it and waits for Marty to pass their bags down.

“Careful,” he murmurs, feeling a broad hand grip his shoulder for balance as Marty takes care with getting back down on the wet ground. Billy is standing in the middle of the empty street with one leg cocked out, busy packing a wad of chewing tobacco into his bottom lip.

Both men watch him go through his ritual and tuck the snuff can away, neither one saying a word. “Little bit of that worm dirt to get me started,” Billy says, and then hitches his hands up on his hips. “Y’all set? Let’s load her up.”

The sea plane is anchored at the end of a long floating dock, parked and waiting for Billy to unlatch the door. Old Moony takes the lead with his cowboy boots clicking along on the wooden planking, and Rust nudges Marty ahead of him down the narrow pathway.

Mast bells and crying gulls drift to and fro through the morning air while Rust and Marty make quick work of stowing their bags aboard. Further down the dock there’s a pair of men in orange waders and a scruffy dog loading up into a modest fishing boat, off on some errand of their own for the day. One of the men sees Rust watching from afar and salutes from a distance, throwing up a gloved hand in brief greeting before getting back to his work.

Billy has looped his docking line around the crook of one arm and opened up the door to the cockpit, throwing it inside under the copilot’s seat. He steps back to hold the door ajar beneath the plane’s wing, gesturing for both men to duck inside. “We’ll back her out from the port and then coast a-ways out there to open water for takeoff.”

Marty eyeballs the empty copilot seat for a long moment before clearing his throat. “Don’t mean to pry into your craft and all, sir, but do you usually fly—uh, alone?”

“Ha!” Billy says with a squawk, and neither one of them saw from where he produced an empty ginger ale can but that’s what he brings up to his mouth to spit into. “You expecting me to turn belly-up and croak sometime soon? Nah, it won’t be in the sky, I can tell you that much. The old devil would want me closer to the ground than that.”

There’s another rabbit foot hanging from a thin chain in the cockpit’s ceiling, twin to the one dangling in the truck’s rearview. Marty looks between it and Billy and then back to Rust before letting out a small laugh. “Guess I’ve done crazier things for you before,” he says, taking the lead to climb up into the plane, and Rust revels one last moment in having his feet flat on the ground before following behind him.

“Skies are clear, wind’s in our favor,” Billy says as he swings up into the cockpit like some crudely-hewn parody of John Wayne jumping into the saddle. “Should be a quick trip all in all,” he says with a grin, glancing over his shoulder at Rust and Marty in the passenger compartment. “I expect we’ll make it up to Fairbanks in time for lunch n’ a beer.”

He pulls his cowboy hat off and tosses it into the passenger seat, revealing a full head of steely silver hair. There’s a headset resting on the dash and Billy slips it on before flipping a number of switches on the console and bringing the plane to life. He secures his seatbelt and then flicks the white rabbit foot before touching two fingers to the roof. “Y’all buckled in back there? Say your final parting words if you got ‘em, it’ll get real loud here in a second.”

Marty checks his belt again for good measure and then makes sure Rust has bothered to lock his in place, finding the man in question sitting with his seatbelt neatly fastened, albeit with both hands wrapped tight around his thighs. He leans in closer so his voice is in Rust’s ear, low but audible over the hum of the plane. “We got the full honeymoon package tour, right?”

Rust blinks at him, almost surprised for a split second before his mask of composure slips back into place. But then he smiles, answer murmured close against Marty’s ear while the other man tries not to laugh. “Maybe a little something like that.”

The propellers kick in and they start moving out across the waterfront, further from the docks and into rougher waves. Billy steers them due north and then the plane picks up speed as he urges it forward, flipping another switch and plugging his headset into the radio. Rust keeps both eyes fixed in his lap as the engine roars, Marty beside him and looking out the window with something tender-feeling fluttering high in his stomach.

But then the choppy skipping along the water gives way, and with a satisfied little hoot from Billy the plane glides up into the air and takes easy wing. Rust allows himself a look up and out, then, and watches as they skim a few yards above the dark blue sea before climbing into higher altitude. The mountains loom in the distance and everything below starts to look tiny and unreal, like they’re peering down into a toy model landscape called Juneau.

The seaplane banks some to the left as it merges into its mapped route, and the last thing Rust sees as they fly out over open water is the lone fishing boat with its three-member crew fading out of sight. It slowly chugs out into the harbor with the same scruffy dog sitting vigil at the bow, looking forward to nothing but salt-bitten wind in its face and the promise of a new journey ahead.

  
  
  


For all his whiskey-bent rickety joints and laughter that rings like a tin can full of blackbirds, Billy Moon can still pilot a plane like a satin spun dream. It takes two hours before they’re touching down on the lakefront in Fairbanks, light as a swan, and coast right on up to the dockside like it’d been waiting with open arms.

Billy’s first course of action after tying up the mooring line is to spit straight into the water and perch his hat back atop his head, standing with one hip cocked out while he watches Rust and Marty shuttle their bags down from the plane. The wind here smells more of cold earth than salt, and he sucks down a deep lungful of it before casting his eyes toward the blue sky.

“It’ll be snowing here in a few days, mark my words on that one,” he says, the little leather tassels on his jacket fluttering in the lake breeze. “You boys got enough kindling built up in that cabin of yours?”

“Supposedly there’s a whole wood box stocked up in the back,” Rust says, glancing down to tug up the zip on his coat. “Space heater, too.”

“Ain’t any little space heater gonna cut through that cold,” Billy says, creased face pinching up even more at the thought. He lets out a low whistle and jams the cockpit door shut before sauntering down the dock into the marina proper, groping around for his snuff can again. “Jug of rye whisky and a warm body, more like.”

Rust doesn’t say anything to that, but when he feels Marty’s eyes on him he only raises his brows a hair and starts lugging bags down the dock. “We gotta get further into town and pick up a truck to get around in,” he calls over to Billy. “You got ties nearby or are we callin’ in for a cab?”

But Billy is already letting his boots lead him up a gravel path toward a modest wooden bait and tackle shop settled at the edge of the lake, braids swinging as he turns and waves them further up the trail. Before he can reach the entrance the door is swinging open wide on rusted hinges, and a stout little woman in a checkered apron steps out with her hands on her hips.

“Billy Moon,” she calls, already shaking her head. “I should shoot you on sight.”

“Miss Primrose, Lady of the Lake,” Billy crows in return, holding his arms out in innocent greeting. “Don’t go tanning my hide just yet, I got company here with me.”

“Like who?” Primrose asks, craning her neck around to squint at Rust and Marty lumbering up the walkway. “I don’t need any of your good for nothing friends up here giving me more trouble than they’re worth.”

Marty’s halfway out of breath when they reach the little shopfront, and Rust isn’t faring much better but looks a little more stoic while he pants through the cold. “Ma’am,” he says, nodding at her while she peers at him through narrowed eyes.

“You two aren’t local,” the woman says, feet firmly planted and set apart while she eyeballs their bags. She looks more like a guard dog than anything as prim and rosy as her name would suggest. “Got a couple names?”

“I’m Rustin Cohle, this here is Martin Hart,” Rust offers, taking a single step back so he’s at Marty’s shoulder. “We’re up here visiting from Louisiana.”

Primrose sniffs some and slips her hands down into her apron pockets, looking between all three men in front of her while she mutters. “Cohle, Cohle, Cohle,” she says, and then finds the thought she was looking for. “You any relation to Travis?”

Marty’s eyes swivel over to Rust’s face, watching the line of his throat work for the barest second before he lightly nods. “Yes ma’am,” he says, meeting her hard stare. “He was my father.”

Billy busies himself with idly polishing one of his silver rings against the sleeve of his coat, eyes cast down even though Primrose won’t look away. “He’s been gone for a good long time now,” she says, wrapping her palms around her elbows. “I don’t know if you and me ever crossed tracks before, but damned if I can’t see some of him looking back at me.”  

“Maybe,” Rust says, offering up what may pass as a civil smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and Marty figures that single word draws out the difference in how two men can remember their fathers. Rust tilts his head, watching her through the midday sunlight. “I never thought we looked much alike.”

“It’s there, alright,” Primrose says, nicely enough. “Though you don’t look so much like a man hell-bent on running from something.”

Those words hang in the air for a few moments, caught on the wind coming in from the lake, before fluttering away altogether.

“We’re all three looking to get up into town from here, Miss Prim,” Billy says while the gold tooth in his mouth shines. “You’d only have to be giving my rat ass a ride back to the lake, scout’s promise—unless you’d feel up to joining me for lunch somewheres.”

Primrose levels him with a look that could wilt stone but pulls her hands out of her apron pockets and reveals a heavy key ring. “It ain’t like I’m not running a proper business or anything around here, Billy Moon,” she says, but slips back through the shop’s door anyhow to holler after somebody inside.

“It’s a good thing you boys are handsome,” Primrose says to Rust and Marty, slipping her apron over her head before exchanging it for a green coat hanging inside the doorway. She stomps down the porch to stand next to Billy, top of her head just barely even with his shoulder. “You’re buying the first round,” she says to him, and then tips her head toward a muddy blue dually truck waiting beside the wooden building. “Let’s roll.”  
  


* * *  
  
  


Fairbanks is a place built around the winding coils of a river and from overhead the plot would look like the heart of a flower, every bridge and channel a petal reaching out into the throw of country that eventually turned into wilderness. But it’s as built-up and busy as any midsized city in the Pacific Northwest—and still cleaner, somehow, with this corner of the country still not quite as trampled and trodden as anywhere else in the lower forty-eight.

They part ways with Billy and Miss Primrose, watching the pair head off further into town with a wave. In four days’ time Billy promises to be back at the lakeside with his seaplane to ferry them down on a return trip to Juneau, and he clasps Rust’s hand once more with a little spark in his eye, tells him _that old man of yours would be proud, son, stubborn as you’ve ever been to believe it._

It takes some guarded slip-sliding around the skinny waif of a man working at the rental dealership, and Rust has to turn down a soft-top jeep and a bright white SUV before he gets what he came looking for, but they drive off the lot in a four-door pickup with a pearlescent shine dusted through the paintjob’s gunmetal grey.

Marty sits shotgun and runs his hands over the leather console and seats while they rumble through downtown, tutting approvingly. “This is real nice,” he says, leaning forward to squint at the navigation system set into the dash. “I bet you already got half a mind to get back home and kick that old Ford to the curb.”

“Wouldn’t be worth much as a trade-in,” Rust says, idly tapping a thumb on the wheel while he watches the light they’re stopped at. “Far as that thing’s gone, ain’t too decent trying to sell it off on some poor kid, either. Might as well drive it into the ground.”

Marty sighs but doesn’t try to hide his little smile. “Well, when the time comes, I reckon you ought to look into something like this,” he says, drumming his fingers on the console, and then lets out a snort. “In the meantime I guess I’ll start making funeral arrangements for your old friend. Think white roses would be fitting for a proper sendoff.”

“You’re real funny, Marty,” Rust drawls, turning into a Safeway parking lot sparsely dotted with cars. “Here I was thinking it might even make it to Lilah’s sixteenth birthday.”

“Lilah’s—her sixteenth birthday?” Marty says, sounding a little more sobered in his quiet surprise. “Here she ain’t even two yet.” He looks at Rust for a long moment, expression gone from something partway bewildered to downright pleased as punch. “You’re softening right on up with age,” he says. “I’m gonna have to write that down, remind you when she’s old enough to start asking Audrey and Orren for a Mercedes.”

“Go ahead,” Rust hums, content enough. “I’m not bound to forget it. And considering that’s her first name, I can tell you right now she won’t be wanting for a Mercedes.”

“How do you go and figure that?”

“Most kids that age, seems like they want to be anything and anybody but the name their parents gave them.”

Marty rubs a hand through the whiskers around his jaw, looking out the windshield even though Rust has pulled into a parking spot. “Huh,” he says, blinking as he mulls that over for a moment. “Shit, though—what makes you think she’s gonna want your old rundown antique from when Clinton was still in office?”

Rust gets a hand around the driver side door and swings it out into the cold, stepping into a puddle of gasoline-slicked water pooled on the concrete. “By that time, I figure it’ll be something cool again.”

“ _Cool_ ,” Marty echoes, laughing as he hops down on the passenger side and goes about messing with his coat. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that come out of your mouth before, lest you were talking about beer.”

“Put that down on the list of shit we’re looking for,” Rust says, squinting ahead at the Safeway’s entrance as they cross the lot. “Sixer or two’d be nice to have while we’re out by the river.”

Neither one of them have touched pen to paper or made any bare semblance of what might constitute a list, but Marty places his trust in Rust knowing what they need to haul up to the cabin. The two of them disappear through the automatic doors that whoosh open with a gritty-sounding whine, and right at the store’s entrance there’s a stuffed wolverine posed in a perpetual prowl next to a sweepstakes stand advertising free cruises down to the California coast.

Marty glances at its yellow-glass eyes as they pass, Rust tugging a rickety shopping cart along by two fingers. “A taxidermy wolverine,” he says. “In a fucking Safeway.”

Rust doesn’t bother to look back, already heading down the first aisle full of canned goods. “Clearly you ain’t ever spent much time in Texas, either. Half the gas stations out on the western side have antelope and mallard ducks mounted up behind the register.”

He drops a can or two of baked beans into the cart and then keeps moving, eyes scanning along the shelves as they walk along. Marty passes jars of pasta sauce, tuna fish packets, bags of rice and flour and cornmeal. “What exactly are we shopping for, in terms of provisions?”

That coaxes a smirk out of Rust. “The cabin’s got running water and a fridge, Marty. Little two-burner stovetop. We aren’t in here looking for jerky and hardtack.”

Marty lets out a low swear and follows Rust down the rear aisle of the store, cooler and humming with refrigerated cases. “Well then, feel free to tell me what the hell we’re looking for so I don’t look any more like a schoolboy following his mama around the place than I already do.”

Rust’s sleepy eyes cut over for a second as he stops to drop a pack of sliced bacon into the cart. “Eggs and bread probably be a good place to start, if you were wanting breakfast in the morning.”

“You gonna be the one cooking it?” Marty laughs, walking a few paces ahead to start peeking through egg cartons, checking for cracks and broken spots in the shells. “I was under the impression this was a vacation.”

“Mmmhm,” Rust hums, sounding carefully undecided as he opens up the dairy case to grab a quart of milk. “We’ll see.”

They meander on through the store, adding a couple sticks of margarine and peanut butter, sliced cheese and lunch meat and a loaf of bread, a small can of coffee and a box of tea, a few things to snack on and then a bottle of faithful Tabasco. Some paper plates and towels, plastic utensils, a case of bottled water and then two brown-bottled sixers of something called Alaskan Summer.

“Can’t get this down south,” Rust says, thumping the cardboard carrier as he sets it on the belt up at checkout. “Think you’ll like it when you try it.”

They carry everything in paper sacks out to the truck, bundling it up in the back with the rest of their bags. Even standing in a grocery store parking lot, nature looms like a mural rising all around them, and Marty’s half-tempted to get his phone out and snap a picture of the mountains sitting like a wall of stone ghosts in the distance.

Rust sees him looking and steps up on the truck’s running board, peering over the Safeway’s roof and across the midday horizon. “Drive up there should be even prettier once we get out of town limits,” he says, something quiet that sounds almost humbled. “I’ll take you further north in a couple days, up there at the edge of the circle.”

“What all’s up there?” Marty says, and that’s a broad way of putting it but for once he doesn’t feel stupid for asking. There’s enough wonderment caught in Rust’s eyes at the mere prospect, almost like a boy believing in the promise of something magic ahead, and that alone makes a shivery little chill crawl up Marty’s spine.

“The wild,” Rust says, blinking to himself before gently thumping the flat of his hand on the truck’s roof. He looks back to Marty and then steps down off the running board, pulling the driver side door open. “C’mon. Let’s get back on the road, got about another hour’s drive ahead.”

Their destination is plotted on the map up until the main drag turns off onto a barely-paved mountain road through the forest, Rebecca had mentioned. The navigation system says much of the same, and points them in a winding route up through hairpin forest roads and across wooden river bridges until it stops short at a thin line marked _Fisherman’s Roost_.

“Should be somewhere off the beaten road, set a-ways back in the woods,” Rust says, tapping the compass marker on the navigation screen. “Easy drive up otherwise. Getting back down might be a different story if it comes up an ice storm, but we’ll cross that bridge if we come to it.”

Marty works his jaw for a moment, contemplating the backlit map in front of them. “How do you go about getting off the side of a mountain if you can’t drive?”

Rust reverses out of the parking spot and doesn’t wait for the navigation system to ding before he’s already headed in the right direction, merging into the steady lull of traffic. “Don’t be worrying about all that,” he says, low and sure, the lilac and silver sprawl of distant mountaintops like lavender syrup caught under his tongue.

There’s no use in rehashing old mornings now forty years gone, about a boy with bread bags hidden in his boots who followed narrow deer paths down through the snow for two days until he finally found his way back to a beaten hunter’s trail. No real use in getting anybody riled up about all that.

“This shit’s all news to me,” Marty says, laughing out something on the faintly brittle side. “Wouldn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground out here if somebody got the notion to come around asking.”

They both seem to silently acknowledge that one man’s at the other’s mercy, not that such a truth is a foreign arrangement for either of them anymore. Maybe that used to be more out of reckless necessity than anything else, a collateral part of the Job and trench-fought warfare, or maybe some little part of Martin Hart had simply always trusted Rustin Cohle with more than he’d ever care to fully admit.

He’d admit it now, if Rust asked. Now that it stopped being a matter of mercy a long time ago.

“Anything comes up, we’ll work our way through it,” Rust says. “I’ll be right there with you the whole time.”  
  
  
  


Marty feels his ears pop about twenty minutes into their haul up into the sprawl of snaking forest road. The asphalt has been laid out and lined like a ribbon through a towering hall of giant spruce and mountain hemlocks, and the sharpest bends overlooking the steep fall below only have staggered guard rails between their truck and the open air. He cracks the window as they drive down the sun-dappled road and breathes in a hint of what the forest has to offer.

“Almost like Christmas,” he says, letting the cold wind blow in his face for a few more seconds before rolling the window back up. “Sure beats the hell out of swamp water and ripe roadkill.”

Rust must’ve caught a whiff too, because he draws in a deep breath to savor the last of it. Like a man with his nose stuck in a sniffer glass of something fine indeed, Marty thinks. Testing the bouquet of the forest.

“Louisiana ain’t all that bad,” Rust says, and that rouses a chuckle out of Marty. “Different place, is all.”

“I think too many years with the same view might’ve addled your judgement a little bit,” Marty says, lightly rapping his knuckles against the glass. “All this is a far cry prettier than anything we might see on the I-10 back home.”  

Rust’s face keeps neutral, eyes tuned straight ahead on the road. “Maybe,” he says. “Though I wouldn’t want to stay here any longer than a season, least not anymore.” He goes quiet for a moment, watching the side mirror as they curve up and around another hairpin turn. “Never did feel like a place to call home—more like a place I should run to.”

Marty ponders that over for a moment, tongue caught at the corner of his mouth. “I always thought that leveled out to be about the same thing.”

“There’s a difference,” Rust says. “Sure you remember living in that apartment with me for a week, way back in ’95. Don’t go telling me that place ever felt like a home to you.”

“Shit,” Marty snorts, looking over with narrowed eyes. “Then it begs asking, did it ever really feel like one to _you?_ Hell, place looked like a prison cell the whole seven years you were in it.”

He realizes how he sounds a second too late and opens his mouth to try and soften the blow, but Rust only huffs out something that might be a laugh and shakes his head.

“Naw,” he says, hands sliding around to the low point in the steering wheel with a whisper. “Way I see it, home’s never really been something I’d call a place.”

Marty clears his throat and nods, decides to let that stay and settle where it lies. It took him a long time to stop asking about things he already knew the answer to, and sometimes he still does, if only for the ease of mind rather than the satisfaction.

Sitting where he is now, on the side of a mountain road in Alaska in the company of one Rustin Cohle, is probably all the answer he really needs.

Their trek up and around slows to a halt two different times, only for a few lingering moments at first when Rust lets the engine idle while a thin red fox scurries into the middle of the road and stops. They watch and it boldly turns to stare down the truck, sniffing the air once before continuing on its way into the underbrush at the roadside, white-tipped bottlebrush tail gone in the blink of an eye.

The second time Rust makes a point of glancing out the driver-side window once and again before he lets the truck slow to a crawl, looking into the forest at something Marty can’t see. “Moose,” he says, rolling the window down to point into the trees. The diesel engine cuts out with the turn of a key and everything goes quiet. “You see her?”

“No,” Marty says, and that’s the truth—all he sees is a thick blanket of forest, glasses be damned, and he leans over the center console until his face is at Rust’s shoulder. “What the hell are you looking at?”

“Follow the tip of my finger,” Rust says, quiet, keeping his right hand steady. “She’s on the move.”

Sure enough, Marty spots the shaggy brown flank at the tip of Rust’s index finger and has to wonder how he ever missed it the first time. They watch for a few more moments as the moose snuffles along the ground and then lifts her head, visage framed by a pair of saplings, both ears pricking forward while she lazily chews. Even from this distance Marty imagines the beast stands at least two or three hands taller than a horse at the shoulder.

“If it was a male we could probably smell it from here,” Rust says. “They’re in rut this time of year—mean as all hell.”

“That’s great,” Marty says, leaning back into his seat with a sigh. “So if and when we get charged, which seems goddamned likely considering it being you and me and all, I take it you’re offering to give me the first boost up a fuckin’ tree.”

Rust watches the female moose through the window, keeping quiet until she slips further into the forest thicket and finally out of sight. “It won’t come down to that,” he says, moving to crank the engine back over. They haven’t seen another vehicle on the mountain road in about twenty minutes, and their stopping in the middle of the road went by without consequence. “If it does, I’ve already gone and made prior arrangements by way of extra precaution.”

“Of course you have, Rust,” Marty says with a little laugh, lacing his hands in his lap like he’s settling in for a story. “I’d have been damn near shocked if you hadn’t.”

Rust briefly glances over before his eyes go back to the road, corner of his mouth twitching on the side Marty can’t see. “Rebecca Barlow’s good for more than just clean sheets and a hot meal,” he says. “Got us squared up nice and pretty where it counts.”

The engine shifts down as they climb up a low incline and around another bend. Every few miles there’s been a little turn-off onto a dirt or gravel rut carved in a path leading further into the trees, usually marked with a little wooden sign rather than reflective green road markers issued by the state. Once or twice the forest along the roadside was cleared out enough that somebody had been able to pasture their livestock there, and they’d driven past a herd of goats foraging through the underbrush and then a pair of tawny horses a little while later, heads bent low and sleepy in the cold shade.

“How much further have we got?” Marty asks a few minutes later, shifting some in his seat. He briefly drums his fingers on the door, eyes gone a little worried and intent on the navigation screen. “Man, I really gotta take a leak.”

“Bout fifteen more minutes,” Rust says, glancing at the map. “You want me to stop?”

“Damn,” Marty sighs, and then unclicks his seatbelt. “Yeah, pull over real quick. My eyes are probably startin’ to turn yellow.”

A minute later the truck’s parked on a shoulder overlooking the forest sloping down beneath them, and Marty’s got his back to the road with nothing but untouched skyline ahead. Rust’s boots are balanced on the running board again, both elbows propped on the roof of the truck while he keeps idle watch. There’s a hint of that craving itch for a cigarette, so close he can taste it against the roof of his mouth, but he sucks in the cold mountain air until it burns through the urge.

“Maybe I ought to take a picture,” he says, mouth turning up into a small smile when Marty’s free hand slowly rises with nothing but the middle finger pointing skyward.

“Here’s your picture,” Marty says, turning his head just enough that Rust can see the arch of one eyebrow. He bounces once on his heels as he shakes dry and zips up, good knee bending a little like it always does while he fastens the button on his pants.

“Reckon I had to empty both tanks on that one,” he says, turning around with a low whistle to find Rust still watching him over the roof of the truck. “You don’t gotta go? Making me feel like an old man over here.”

Rust shakes his head, squinting some against the overcast sky. The clouds are thicker now but don’t look mean, still thin enough for the sun to glow through. “Naw, I’m not the one who had two cups of coffee this morning,” he says. “You’ll be glad this cabin has an indoor commode—used to be growing up out here, we had to drag ass out back with a Sears catalogue at the crack of dawn. Rain, snow, pitch dark—didn’t fucking matter.”

“Must be why you’re so ornery,” Marty says with a little huff of laughter, trudging back up to the truck. “Growing up in the stone age n’ all.”

“Must be,” Rust says, swinging back down into the driver seat before cranking the engine back over. Marty settles in beside him and reaches for his seat belt, but Rust shakes his head as they pull back on the road. “We’re just about there, now. Start looking for the sign that says Fisherman’s Roost.”

  
  


Just as promised, the navigation system loses track of the way a good mile or so before they find Fisherman’s Roost, doing nothing more than pointing them further ahead in an endless coil up through the highlands. The sign in question is little more than a piece of timber planking staked into the ground, chipping white hand-painted over letters carved into the wood. Marty spots it first and Rust slows the truck when he sees it too, easing off onto the single dirt lane that disappears through the trees.

“Only one way coming and going,” Marty murmurs, watching mottled sunlight roll up over the hood of the truck through the branches above. The greenery on either side of the lane is thinned out but only barely, and it’s clear that nobody has been out to prune or cut back the overgrowth in quite some time.

“Good,” is all Rust says, slowly guiding over a pothole on the right side of the lane. “We meet anybody else coming or going inside the next few days, I figure we’re gonna have a problem.”

Marty lets out a huff of throaty laughter. “If you wanted me all to yourself so bad, all you had to do was ask.”

Rust hums a little to himself at that, flexing his hand around the wheel. “Don’t imagine that’s anybody’s business but our own,” he drawls out, words innocent enough, though there’s something in his tone that makes Marty’s skin warm and prickle. But then Rust ducks down a bit, peering ahead just as they get within sight of a clearing opening through the forest. “Here we go.”

A shy patch of earth opens up in the crowded family of towering conifers, just enough room to comfortably fit the cabin and a vehicle or two with a little plot of what may pass as a yard to spare. Tire tracks worn into the ground serve in place of a concrete driveway, and if there was once a loose gravel lane leading in from the road it’s long since been pressed into the dirt and nearly worn away. The sunlight sifting down from the overcast sky isn’t over-bright or glaring, still filtered through the pine needles and leaves so it settles on the ground sparse and welcoming.

Just beyond the clearing, they can see through the trees enough to spot water moving over stones the color of wet seals.

The cabin itself is on the small side but well-built, a handsome gabled roof furnished with a wooden deck and kindling shed around the side. It’s been touched by the elements for more than a few good years, the porch nearing the color of sun-bleached bone and the roof and brickwork chimney spotted with a patch or two of lichen, but Marty only smiles as he finally steps down out of the parked truck with a puff of fogged breath in the air.

“Would you look at that,” he says, surveying the cabin with both hands hitched up on his hips. “A sight for sore eyes and asses if I ever did see one.”

“Ain’t nothing too special,” Rust says, squinting around the clearing, no doubt making his first mental sketch of the place. “But it’ll do just fine, I think.”

He smoothes a palm against the side of his coat and promptly reaches into the right pocket to produce a brass key. It’s just something plain you could buy from any locksmith or hardware store, but it has a braided red string looped through and knotted for hanging. It’s the same one, Marty knows, that Rebecca had pressed into Rust’s hand the night before.

They follow one another up the few creaking steps to the wooden porch, standing staggered beneath the awning on a worn and bristled doormat. A boot scraper has been left out where it’s bolted to the planking, and Marty eyeballs it with some curious sense of awe while Rust pushes the key into the lock and lets the door swing into the cabin with a weak groan.

Any of the cold barrenness he was partway expecting to find is nowhere in sight, and while Rust stands just inside the doorway Marty is already moving further into the foyer, turning his head to soak in the furnishings and modest trimmings tacked up on the walls.

The cabin’s interior consists of one big room without many doors, though it’s been partitioned off with walls so the kitchenette and bathroom have their own little nooks. Blackout curtains are pulled back in the windows, letting daylight sprawl across the room so it barely touches the heavy quilt made up on the wide bed. There’s a vaulted loft above with room for storage and another pair of twin mattresses, and the dark fireplace is nestled between the stove and a blanket-draped armchair.

A buck’s head is mounted up on the far wall, glass eyes clear black and cold, though somebody who came before them has hung what looks like a dog whistle and a tied bundle of herbs from its antlers. Other than the small kitchen table and a dresser with an ancient-looking radio set on top, the only furniture to be found beyond the bed and night table is a tall folding screen that hides a large basin tub fitted with a showerhead and curtain.

It’s a strangely rustic mix of new and used, weathered and clean, but all clearly cared for and well lived-in. The air itself smells faintly of earth but mostly of something like clean linen, and Rust figures Rebecca’s family must’ve laundered everything fresh just before they arrived.

“Shit’s downright charming,” Marty says, sounding distinctly pleased through his wry huff of laughter. “Almost like one of them little mouse houses in the books the girls used to read.”

“You gonna complain about it the whole time we’re here?” Rust asks, feeling a strange weight in his limbs even as he leaves the door cracked behind him. But Marty only shakes his head while he pulls the zip down on his coat, not bothering to give Rust a sideways glance to let on whether he heard any irritation in the other man’s voice or not.

“Wouldn’t dare dream of it,” he says, and immediately catches sight of the space heater set up along one wall before thudding across the floor to start tinkering with it. A few buttons and one switch later, the thing rumbles to life and starts puffing warm air out against the palms of Marty’s hands. “There we go—little bit of warmth was all it needed.”

Rust doesn’t say it had that the moment Marty walked through the door. Instead, he tries on a weak smile and leans back out onto the porch, tucking the red-strung key back into his pocket. The cold mountain air helps to untangle the knotted ball of something lingering in the back of his head, and he breathes it in again like a musky healing vapor.

“Best to go ahead and get everything unloaded and put away,” he says, fingers brushing the worn wood of the doorjamb. The grooved sensation is something strong enough that he can almost feel it in his teeth. “I wanna get a good look around the area before dark.”

Marty finally looks up at him from where he’s standing across the room, then, and gets a faint little brightness caught in his eye. He watches Rust for a moment and then slowly closes the few paces between them, and Rust feels his lashes dip and lower when Marty’s close, the line of his throat bobbing some in place. He doesn’t know why he’s full of something taut and quivering, or maybe he does, but it nevertheless starts to sink and ebb away when a whiskery kiss lands somewhere below his eye.

“Hey now, we got here in one piece,” Marty says, murmured close to Rust’s ear. “You did real good.”

Simple words shouldn’t do so much to set him at ease, and Rust tries not to sag in his boots where he stands. He’s tired, but not so tired that he’s ready to collapse into Marty and not move for the rest of the day, though maybe that’s a good thought for later.

“It’s just—a lot to think about, you know,” he mutters, and immediately feels stupid for having said as much, but Marty only smiles and kisses him full-on this time, one heavy hand in a grounding weight against the small of his back.

“Let’s get the truck unloaded, maybe eat something real quick,” he says, taking a small step back to give Rust some room. “Imagine a little fresh air and exploring might do us both some good.”

He nods a bit, and then having made sure that Rust is intent on following, smooths a hand down one thigh and takes the porch steps at a trot. They haven’t been fitted with anything skid-resistant and Rust makes mental note to keep his stride two short steps behind Marty’s at the first sign of wet snow on the ground.

For now he starts back toward the truck, mind idly working around the promise of a something to fill the gnawing in his stomach and how it’ll feel to get nothing but the untouched Alaskan soil up under his boots again.

  
  
  


Daylight is already starting to grow long in the tooth by three in the afternoon, dipping closer toward the peaked mountains to the west. Rust watches the forest from where he stands leant up against the deck railing, polishing off the last few bites of a cold turkey sandwich Marty’d thrown together and handed off to him nearly first thing.

The surrounding woodland is quiet but not eerily so, still awash with the natural white noise of everything Rust remembers. A rustling breath of wind through the trees, the low buzz of a passing insect; even the river’s rush downstream sounds tame out here, muffled down into something soothing. There’s none of the chorusing cicada song that he’s grown so used to hearing while sitting out under humid southern nights, but the chattering laugh of a ptarmigan bird rouses somewhere nearby and he knows that strange song just as well, too.

Marty sticks his head through the door and sniffs against the cold, idly twisting a faded dishtowel between his hands. “Before we get to running around the dawning wilderness here,” he says, “remind me what you meant earlier with all that extra precaution business.”

Rust blinks once but then starts forward in motion, brushing past Marty to head back inside. He looks around the main room and lets his eyes fall on the stonework fireplace, moving forward in measured stride like a cat balancing on a fence.

“Should be over here somewhere,” he says, gingerly testing his weight on the floorboards. They creak just the same as any of the others and don’t seem to give up their secret, so Rust moves further into a little corner behind the ash trowel and hearth broom and taps his heel on the wood.  

When it thuds hollowly, he grunts to himself and crouches down to start working something with his hands. Marty’s curiosity long since won any front of a battle and he’s at Rust’s back in two steps, peering into the crook just in time to watch a section of floorboard pry loose with the help of a pocketknife.

Rust pulls out a bundle of something wrapped in plain oilcloth, and when it unravels in his hands he holds up a semi-automatic pistol and two clips. He checks the chamber on the gun and then stands back up, passing it over to Marty.

“Thought it’d be best to have that on hand,” he says, briefly stooping over to cover up the little compartment in the floor. “Likely won’t even need to lay a finger on the trigger, but if the need should arise…” He trails off, moving over to his suitcase to unzip the main compartment. “Figure I’d rather not take the chance and be caught without it.”

Marty hefts the gun in his hand, checking for a serial number he has to squint at to read. He looks up just as Rust pulls his holster out and lays it on the edge of the bed. “Guess you went and packed that away when I wasn’t looking.”

“Didn’t want your mind worrying on it too much with all the traveling we’ve been doing,” Rust says, undoing the buckle on his belt. He glances down to get the holster settled on his right hip before letting his flannel shirt drape back over it.

“Well, you ought to know I feel kind of spare without my piece, you over here carrying n’ all,” Marty says, fingering the edges of a magazine clip. He works his jaw for a moment, eyes cast low to where Rust’s holster is now hidden from sight. “What am I supposed to do if shit goes south and we’re put in a position where you can’t draw and fire?”

Rust gives a small shake of his head as he pulls a rucksack out and carries it over to the kitchen. “Get the gun if you can, run if you can’t,” he says, dropping a couple water bottles into the bag that already holds a length of nylon rope and the pack of lighters they picked up at the grocery store. “Aim for between the eyes, single flank shot won’t do much to stop a grizzly.”

“That’s real heartening to hear,” Marty grouses, passing the gun over for Rust to holster. “I feel so much fucking better, Rust.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much,” Rust says, glancing up from under his brows. “You likely make enough racket to scare ‘em off before we ever lay eyes on one.”

Marty lets out a hoot before he laughs. “I’ll be taking that shit in stride, then.” He sighs a little and shakes his head, a trace of humor still hanging around his mouth. “God, feel like I’ve aged ten years since we landed in Juneau.”

“I’ve always found that time doesn’t move so much out here,” Rust says as he shoulders the rucksack, sounding on the softer side of being cryptic. “Tends to only catch up with you once you get out and look back on where you’d been standing.” He pockets his phone after checking the time and pulls up the zipper on his coat again, not giving much mind to the look Marty’s busy casting his way. “You ready to take a walk?”

Marty snorts at that. “A walk,” he muses, bending a bit to tighten the lace on his left boot. When he straightens back up he’s smiling and Rust is suddenly struck, maybe not for the first time, with how thankful he is that they made it this far.

“Lead the way, cowboy,” Marty says, tipping his head toward the door. “I’m following you.”  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


They follow the curve of the river for a half-mile or so, moving under the languid spell of the woods and easy silence. Birdcall and crunching leaves mingle with the slow rush of the water, and soon the current grows more distant as Rust heads further east away from the muddy bank.

A few words are passed between them like skipping stones, brief and bright before they drop beneath the surface. Warm and simple things—questions asked and answered, caution cast toward a gnarled root or slippery rock, pointing out some strange or fantastic facet of nature.

Marty contemplates the peacefulness of their shared quiet as he walks in stride with Rust, at times letting his eyes stray to his own feet carrying him along through the woodland. Memory, he realizes, starts to blur and burn at the edges after a while. Soft focus, Vaseline smeared on the lens of his past. There once was a time when being in Rust’s company felt like sitting at the foot of a simmering volcano—not in the sense that he was waiting in fear for an explosion, but that he coexisted with the man by always keeping one wary eye cast toward the mountain. Disquietude, is what it was. The general unease that coincides with how unpredictable and swift such a force of nature could be.

And so any silence between them had felt like too much like overwrought tension on a bowstring. Wound tight enough to snap and split if you pulled it just right, and Marty knows firsthand what the whip-back felt like when it was broken. He couldn’t have known that they’d get to where they are now. Wouldn’t have been able to believe it, truth be told—not from either of them, not even the sparest edge of an inkling.

And so Marty sometimes wonders if they’re hard men who grew weary, or simply bad men who finally managed to get comfortable.

“Look here,” Rust says, nearly two miles from the cabin with the fading sun slipping between the treetops to burn orange in his hair. He bends at the waist to pick something up where it’d been half-hidden in the leaves, and Marty watches as Rust holds up a long, sturdy stick that hits him right about where his first rib starts.

They both consider it for a moment, Rust brushing a few damp leaves away before passing it over. “Might make a good walking stick,” he says while Marty leans his weight into the thing to test its hold and give. “If you want to take it back we can whittle out a loop through the top later, make it easier to carry.”

“Probably a decent idea,” Marty murmurs, taking a measured step ahead with the stick in hand. “My damn knee’s been burning pretty good the last quarter-mile now.”

Rust almost looks pained at the suggestion, if it weren’t for the flash of something else that moves across his face in an instant. “Why didn’t you tell me it was bothering you?” he asks, and Marty knows what guilt looks like on Rust’s face when he sees it.

“It ain’t all that bad,” Marty says, almost too quickly, chewing at his bottom lip. He tightens his hands around the walking stick and doesn’t quite look Rust in the eye. “I didn’t want to hold us up none while we were here, y’know.”

They watch one another through the darkening shade beneath the trees. The sun is sinking ever lower, making the sky bleed at the throat into Alaskan twilight.

“You know this ain’t about all that,” Rust says finally, gone quieter. “I brought you here, Marty—” He stops short, lips curling around whatever it was he couldn’t say until they press into a thin line.

“Don’t you dare go getting that whipped dog look about me,” Marty says, shaking his head. “I’ll push myself as far as I damn well please, and if gets to be too much I’ll be sure to let you know.”

“You shouldn’t have to tell me,” Rust says, eyes flashing up. “This ain’t like taking an extra mile around the fuckin’ block—you push yourself too far out here, you get yourself hurt or worse off than that.”

“As I remember it, we came up here to see some shit,” Marty says, shifting his weight back onto his heels. “I’m more than perfectly aware that me being a part-time cripple ain’t so conducive to getting around to see it.”

“That don’t matter,” Rust says, dropping his shoulders down. His voice lowers again and he looks as the long cast of his own shadow pointing east. “I’d crawl if I needed to, Marty. You know that—I told you why I wanted you to come with me. Neededyou, to come with me.”

Marty sniffs some through the chill and huffs out a cloud of breath in a soft sigh. He smiles, though, just enough that Rust can see it hanging around his eyes. “I remember.”

“Good,” Rust says, stepping closer before looking back in the direction of the river. “I ain’t in any big hurry, so we’ll take our fucking time if we want to. Ready to head back in before it gets too dark anyhow.”

“You bring a flashlight?” Marty asks.

Rust grunts at that, forehead creased while he peers through the spruce and alder. “Didn’t see the need for one.”

“If it’s all the same to you,” Marty says, starting back toward the water, “I’d prefer we get some hustle going.”

They greet the riverbank again shortly thereafter, and judging by the slant of sun through the trees they should have another fifteen minutes until it sinks below the horizon. Rust brings his watch up closer to his face so he can read the time, noting that it’s only twenty past six o’clock. Three time zones ahead in Louisiana they’d be starting to head toward bed if they weren’t already there, and the long haul of the day is catching up with him quicker than he imagined it would. Marty drives a hard bluff when he’s stubborn enough to keep his mind on it, but if Rust is wearing thin he knows the other man is probably a few threads shorter than that by now.

Marty only whistles lowly to himself as they move along parallel to the water, one little tune before it tapers off. “You really do move different out here,” he says, watching Rust’s feet. “Never seen you so light on your feet before.”

“Reckon old habits die hard,” Rust says, not slowing or changing his gait. “Pop had it ground into me the second I was old enough to keep up at his heels.”

“Just strange, I suppose,” Marty muses, looking down to watch his own boots crunch through the leaves. “Thinking how this place has known you a whole lot longer than I have.”

Rust blinks at that, clearing his throat so a light gust of breath catches in the air. “Don’t mean it knows me any better,” he says, watching Marty from the corner of his eye.

“But it does,” Marty says, snorting to himself. “Not that I’m sitting here all jealous of the fuckin’ topography or nothing, but it seems pretty obvious—to me, at least—that these woods have seen more of you than most people ever did.”

“Quite an observation you’re making there,” Rust says, though he doesn’t try and deny it. He knows the feeling that currents through his blood when he gets deep out in the wilderness, how it digs its claws in and wells up lines of dark red. How you can try to leave a place behind and forget it even though it won’t ever forget you.

“You’ve made a name for yourself here that I haven’t ever heard,” Marty says. He doesn’t sound put off by it, more perceptive in his settling insight. “That much was clear to me right from the start.”

Rust only looks up ahead of them, peering through the falling dark with his jaw set at a harder angle. “I never really wanted it,” he says. “Crash, Travis Cohle’s son—parts I had to play, Marty. Only reason they ever lasted long as they did is because expectation tends to turn into reality, you leave it alone long enough.”

“Crash,” Marty murmurs, like he’s got to test the weight of it in his mouth. They pass that word between them day in and day out, casual as can be, but it hasn’t been something he took for a name in a long time now. “From what I could see, you were damn good at that too.”

Rust hums to himself, a soft noise low in his throat. “Think we ought to know by now that being good at something and enjoying it are two different things.”

That thought lingers between them for a long moment. The lonely call of a night bird moves above in flight, and the cabin has finally come back into view further ahead.

“Well, it’s just you and me,” Marty says at last, limping only a little bit that Rust can see. “And as far as expectations out here go, I ain’t expecting to find anybody but you.”

“That’s real sweet of you, Marty,” Rust says, dry as a bone, even though he feels himself smile all the same.

Marty only lets out a laugh and bites into his lower lip. “Hey, least I try.”

Behind them the last splinter of daylight drops beneath the mountain peaks. The cabin’s single porch lamp stands out bright and golden like a distant firefly, and they follow it through the darkness until they’re warm and indoors again.

  
  
  


With two armloads of kindling stacked up by the hearth, Rust locks up the cabin and starts building a fire with twisted sheets of newsprint and his old lighter. Marty’s shed out of his coat for the night and watches a skillet heat up on the little stovetop, ready to drop a pat of butter in to start melting down. He yawns while he waits, reaching up to press the heel of his hand into one eye.

“I ain’t gonna last much longer here after supper,” he says, slumped where he stands so his stomach paunches out. “Hope that bed is as soft as it looks.”

“Find out here in a little bit,” Rust says, crumpling up a wad of paper and stuffing it under the iron fire grate. Smoke has started to stream up the flue while the kindling faintly crackles, and he watches the flames until they lick up over the wood and finally catch.

Marty cracks the lid on a can with an aluminum _pop_ and the sound seems to stir something in his head, because Rust hears him huff to himself while he empties tomato soup into a pot they’d found in one of the cabinets. It takes him a few moments spent buttering a slice of bread and dropping it into the waiting pan before he decides it’s worth sharing.

“Wonder how that cat’s doing,” he says. Grilled cheese starts sizzling and Rust follows the smell across the room so he can drop down at the little table tucked into the corner of the kitchenette.

He starts unlacing his boots before he drawls out a question. “You miss her already?”

“I didn’t say that,” Marty says, careful not to be too quick on the draw. “She just never ain’t been dropped off somewhere else before, outside the vet and all.”

Rust tucks his laces away and sits back up, watching Marty’s back while he checks the underside of a sandwich. “You forget we got her secondhand, maybe third, out of a kill shelter on Pont Des Mouton.”

“I ain’t talking about her past life shit,” Marty says, cutting one hand through the air with a gesture that looks like it was meant to imply something vaguely metaphysical. “I’m talking about ever since she’s been with us.”

“Sure she’s settling in by now,” Rust says, feeling himself start to yawn just as hard as Marty had earlier. “Can call Shelley tomorrow and ask her to put Ghost on the phone for you.”

Marty lets out a low swear and claps his spoon on the edge of the pot, shooting Rust a dirty look over one shoulder. “Do you want me to feed your smart ass or not?”

“I’ve fed myself more than a few times up here without having to get anything out of a can,” Rust says, folding his hands under his chin. “It ain’t pretty but it’s passable fare.”

“Well, I’ll let you go on out and dig up some roots and worms to tide you over, then,” Marty snorts, moving around to find a pair of bowls in the upper cabinets. “Maybe run wild with the wolves and howl at the moon, summon up a forest spirit or two.”

Rust gets up to pull a few drinks from the fridge, carrying them back over to the table before watching Marty at the counter. “Most of the Dena’ina people don’t fuck around with that shit,” he says. “We go down to the valley in a day or two, you can ask Aya about the stick people living out in the woods.”

“Aya?” Marty says, eyes swiveling over to the other man.

“That’s not her given name,” Rust says, and something small in his voice has softened into what sounds like humble modesty, shy and almost childlike. “Somebody I’ve known since I was a kid—she’s getting way on in her years, now. Probably older than my Pop would’ve been.”

He passes the pad of a thumb over his mouth, lost in thought for a moment. “I haven’t seen her in a long time, and I figure I ought to do it before—well. You know what the fuck I mean.”

“You think she’d be able to have company out of the blue?” Marty asks, and the implied question is unspoken but clearly there. Rust can go wherever he pleases in this place, untethered and unbound by whatever law he’s written for himself here. Marty isn’t sure where he stands just yet, though he’s got a feeling it’s somewhere inside the footprints Rust leaves for him to follow.

“She’s always been expecting company, even in the dead of winter when the sun ain’t set in two damn weeks,” is all Rust says, pushing off the counter to sit back down at their little table. “If I didn’t bring you out to meet her and she knew we’d been here, I imagine I’d be looking over one shoulder for the rest of my natural life.”

The soup is done heating up and Marty divvies it up between two bowls, scraping the spoon around the pot until he’s satisfied. “Well then,” he says, setting Rust’s share down in front of him before he goes back to get their sandwiches. “I’ll be looking forward to meeting her. She don’t live alone, does she?”

“Last I knew she lived with her son in the house where he was born,” Rust says, watching Marty settle across from him. Their knees knock together but he doesn’t draw back or shift away. “He’s about my age, maybe a few years younger—Abram. Works with the forestry division a lot, more of a rugged type.”

“Huh,” Marty says, and that’s the last they say of it while they start working through supper. It’s a quiet and comfortable enough ritual, though maybe a little strange without the easygoing lull of the kitchen radio, and he ponders that for a minute before he gets up and walks over to the old dresser across the room.

“You think there’s any reception out here?” he asks, checking the outlet plug before switching on the first knob that looks plausible. “We might be too far out in the sticks to pick up anything better’n static on this fucking antique.”

The speakers crackle and hiss and whir while he spins the dial, and it takes some jimmying in both directions before the low croon of a voice fades in. The tune sounds distant but is whole enough to make out through the airwaves, and Rust listens to a few words before he knows the source.

“Creedence Clearwater,” he says, spoon brought halfway to his mouth with tomato soup still steaming midair. “That the only station it’s picking up?”

Marty twists the dial back and forth again but they can only catch whirring static. “Seems like it,” he says, and leaves the last few notes of the song to linger through the cabin while he goes back to the other half of his grilled cheese.

They polish their plates and tidy up the little kitchenette, rinsing out bowls and pots and wiping down the counters. The cabin has a number of odds and ends squirreled away in nooks and crannies—not necessarily strange, but perhaps things they hadn’t been expecting to find. There’s a bag of mismatched glass marbles and stones and a yellowed copy of _Wuthering Heights_ in the bedside table, a roughly knitted but soft and heavy scarf made from cranberry-colored yarn in one of the dresser drawers. Rust finds a half-empty tin of herbal tea in the otherwise empty breadbox, and it isn’t until they’ve pulled the curtains and Marty starts up the shower that he finds a little collection of soap in the hinged cabinet by the tub.

He’s stripped down to his boxers and bringing the little paper-wrapped bars up to his nose, making a sour face at the ones printed with purple lettering. “Lavender,” he laments, and then tries another sealed in pale yellow. “The sandalwood one ain’t that bad, though.”

“Mmm,” Rust hums, watching Marty from where he’s sitting near the fire with his socked feet propped up in front of the hearth. The folding screen is still between them but he can see the other man from his vantage point just fine. Marty checks the falling water behind the curtain and doesn’t deem it warm enough to get in just yet, but he still steps out of his underwear and leaves them in a pile with his other clothes on the floor.

He braces one hand on the edge of the bath while he bends to fish a folded washcloth out of the cabinet, and Rust’s eyes stray to the little pink scar on his waist, just above the softened jut of his hipbone.

That’s a scar he earned for Rust—not the first and probably not the last with how their lives inescapably orbit and tangle up with one another. A bullet through Marty’s side, and one more marker on the long map that brought them up here.

Rust thinks, sometimes, because he’s rehashed certain nights in their lives a thousand times in the ruined hallways of his head, that he can trace twenty years in scars on Marty’s body—that Marty could do the very same for him by now through memory alone. Some earned out of carelessness, others out of spite. Others yet out of something else entirely, and that’s the word that he can’t believe they’ve strung between them after all this time.

The careless, spiteful, crazy things a man would do out of hatred. Funny how he’d do much of the same for love.

Marty catches Rust looking and only winks before he slips behind the shower curtain, letting out a little yelp against the spray of hot water. He starts rinsing off and Rust watches the fire with his thoughts dancing alongside it, picture and memory flickering across his mind.

“You got any big plans for tomorrow?” Marty calls over the sound of falling water after a while, and Rust raises his head, blinking against his own fatigue. The smell of sandalwood is wafting through the air now and he vaguely thinks that it’s a suiting scent for Marty—warm and golden and heady, like cedar left out in the sun.

“Not really,” Rust says, reaching up to press two fingers against the pulse jumping under his jaw while he thinks. “Figured we’d get our feet up underneath us, stick around here for the day.”

“That’s fine by me,” Marty says, pausing to twist the faucet until the water stops running with a squeak. The drain gurgles and he fumbles for a towel hanging outside the tub before his fingers finally find it. “Considering I don’t know if I’ll make it out of bed before noon.”

Rust unthreads the gun, holster and all out of his belt loop and sets it on the dresser with the safety switched on. He waits for Marty to get out and dressed before he strips out of his own clothes and steps into the steam-warmed bath, tipping his face toward the hot water. He doesn’t think while he washes, runs through the routine of soaping and rinsing and brushing his teeth with sleep already snapping at his heels, and it isn’t until he’s sitting on the edge of the mattress that he really bothers to open his eyes and see.

They’ve turned down all the lights inside, save for the firelight and the single lamp on Marty’s side of the big quilted bed. It’s quiet despite the radio muted down low, familiar but different without the crickets lulling them off to sleep in the trees outside. Marty’s already curled up under the covers behind him, and when Rust feels a warm hand brush against his lower back he shivers with the submerging feeling of something like the unmistakable navel-tug of déjà vu.

But then it’s gone, and Marty’s yawning like a lion with two fingers tucked into the waistband of Rust’s boxers. He snaps the elastic once and withdraws again to his side of the bed, tucking the offending hand up under his pillow. “Will you come over here and settle down so I can turn this goddamn light out,” he murmurs, sleepy and already muffled through the pillow. “No reason to be thinkin’ so hard on a vacation.”

Rust half-turns, lashes lowered enough that he has to peer through them into the shadowed room around them. “Do you feel like the veil is thinner?” he asks, leaning more heavily into the soft sheets beneath his hands. Marty’s never set foot in Alaska before but he can’t quite bite down on the urge to ask. “Here. This place, this time of year—like boundaries aren’t so opaque anymore.”

“What’s this veil you’re talkin’ about,” Marty says, blinking at Rust’s back through the lamplight even as he sags further into the bed. His voice starts growing fainter, falling down the long well of sleep. “We ain’t…married.”

Rust’s stomach tightens up for a second before he lets out a deep breath. “The shroud between time and space,” he says, even though Marty isn’t really listening anymore. “Between here and there, what is and what isn’t. What—what we want, and then what we really deserve.”

Like a hissing sieve torn into the malleable fabric of reality, but Rust doesn’t say that. He’s too tired and the day’s been too long. Marty’s breathing has grown softer and more measured and Rust thinks he wants nothing more in this beating moment than to fall into a pillow and join him.

Marty doesn’t stir when Rust leans over him to twist off the light, though he lets out a contented sort of sigh when he feels the other man finally fold himself under the covers and curl up on his side.

“Go to sleep, babe,” Marty mumbles, even though he’s already there himself.

Rust closes his eyes and does just that.  
  


* * *  
  
  


The hearth and heater have both gone dark and cold by first light, though neither man bothers with hurrying out of bed to start tending a new fire. Rust’s toes curl under the quilt at the thought of walking barefoot across the cabin floor, and when Marty snakes an arm around his side to pull him closer from where they’d drifted apart during the night, he only scoots into the shared warmth and reminds himself the fire can wait.

“What time is it?” Marty murmurs, face pressed halfway into his pillow with both eyes still shut. The room around them is filled with that cool shade of familiar grey-blue that holds hands with dawn, and despite being so far from the South Rust can nearly smell the dewy grass and hear the mourning doves cooing out their first call of the day.

“Going on seven,” he says, squinting at the clock over Marty’s shoulder.

Marty’s brow scrunches up for a moment while he tries to mentally track the time. “Shit,” he says. “We slept just about ten hours.”

“So much for all your sleeping in ‘til noon,” Rust says, though he doesn’t make much effort to move beyond trying to push a knee between Marty’s. That’d been an odd sensation way back at the start of things, the feeling of their shins rubbing together like a pair of crickets, but they’d gotten used to it despite Marty’s halfhearted jokes about Rust forgetting to shave.

Here and now he only shifts around so they can fit together, cricket legs be damned.

“I forgot where we were for a minute,” Marty says, reaching up with his free hand to stifle another wide yawn. His face splits into a little grin and Rust feels himself smile back, content enough for the moment to close his eyes and listen to the other man’s sleepy-mussed voice.

“Wanna see what the river’s throwing downstream this time of year,” he says, and Rust knows Marty’s thinking of the fishing tackle and waders hanging up in the little cabinet around back of the cabin by the woodpile. They hadn’t been able to bring anything of their own up for the haul, but the lingering glance he’d taken at the rods the night before seemed promising enough.

Rust doesn’t nod, though he stretches the low arch of his back with a satisfied sigh that comes out more like a moan. The sparse shape of Marty’s eyebrows go up at that, and he reaches across them to throw the covers back without warning.

“Best get you up and out of this bed before we go getting distracted,” he says around a burst of laughter, gently thumping Rust somewhere on the high part of his thigh before pulling away. “Ain’t any use in an honest fishing trip if you don’t get an early start.”

The air’s cold enough that their bare skin prickles with goosebumps almost right away, and Rust swears outright against the chill as he rolls over to climb out of bed.

“Can’t let the fire die down like this again,” he mumbles, picking his way across the hardwood until he’s bent at the dark hearth. “Carelessness—you’ll regret it every fucking time.”

“Let me go ahead and get the coffee started, since you’re clearly in dire need,” Marty says from the little kitchenette, pawing through the cabinets and a grocery sack until he finds the bag of grounds he was looking for. Rust ignores him while he stacks wood in the grate, and it isn’t until the smell of coffee starts filling the cabin that the air seems to warm up around them.

Eggs over easy and two pieces of bread put through the toaster oven suffice for breakfast, and Marty fills up a thermos with the leftover coffee before stepping out the rear door to face the new morning. Rust can hear him rustling around in the storage cabinet after unhinging the padlock, and there’s a clatter of a tin bucket and something that rolls across the deck before Marty’s muffled voice drifts back in through the cracked door.

“Pretty good equipment they keep here,” he says, and Rust can imagine the furrow drawn between his eyes while he starts picking his tackle for the day, probably not unlike the way a lady would pick out her jewels and finery for a party. “Not the best, but not too damn bad either.”

Rust holsters the pistol and then shrugs into his coat, moving quietly between the dresser and the kitchen table. They’d left the radio running through the night, turned down so low it was barely audible, and he makes to click the dial off before thinking otherwise—it’d always been better to give off the illusion of somebody being home, at least when he wasn’t living alone. He tucks his ledger and pencils into the rucksack along with Marty’s thermos and picks up a paper grocery bag from the counter, folding it between his hands as he walks onto the deck.

“You planning on doing some shopping?” Marty asks offhand, glancing at the Safeway bag before going back to examine the box of brightly feathered fishing flies in his hands.

“For any waste you can’t bury,” Rust says, tucking the bag in next to his notebook with a short sniff. “Can’t leave nothing behind.”

Marty nods at that and then clicks the lid on the tackle box, gesturing for Rust to pick up the steel bucket holding the folded waders at their feet. “Get a handle on that if you could—I’ll carry the rods down if you got the lockup.”

Two minutes later they’re following a narrow footpath down to the river from Fisherman’s Roost, winding between a thick sea of ferns and underbrush. Early morning pries bright fingers down through the treetops, and Rust can feel the warm sun on his shoulders despite their breath fogging on the October air. Marty follows behind him with the long fly rods braced across one shoulder, tackle box swinging in his opposite hand. They hear the river before they can see it and the first glimpse is nearly blinding at the right angle, sunlight rippling on the surface like peeled gold.

“I haven’t been out on anything but the lake back home in nigh on ten years,” Marty says as they reach the end of the footpath and break out onto gravel bank. The cold pebbles give and shift under their boots as they walk between larger rocks, the crunching sound sharp and pleasing in Rust’s ears.

Marty picks out a spot in the sunshine and settles down on a flat rock the size of a recliner to start threading and dressing his pole. He pulls his knit cap down over his ears and works with cold but nimble fingers, delicately holding up a pheasant-feather fly to squint at it through one eye. Rust takes a seat a few feet away, watching the moving water until his gaze turns back toward Marty. There’s a certain fineness in his movements when he works like this—not something people would expect or imagine, maybe, thinking about Martin Hart with all his bluster and brightness as anything resembling an artisan.

Rust ponders that for a moment. Thinks of the Marty he knew from twenty years ago, what he’s said of his straight-laced father and what he might’ve formerly thought it meant to be a man. Perhaps there was never any real room for creativity outside the macaroni and glue pictures a little blonde boy stopped bringing home to his mama after third grade, no encouragement or approval for frivolous pursuits that wouldn’t put food on the table or notches in a belt—aside from what Rust is watching now, a trade’s craft spun out with hooks and twine and iridescent feathers that shine under the sun.

“You plan on throwing a line out or are you gonna sit there and look pretty all day?” Marty says without warning. “Remind me of that one statue where the dude looks like he’s sitting on the john doing a crossword.”

Rust cracks a smile. “The Thinker,” he says, looking up to meet Marty’s eye through the midmorning light. “Auguste Rodin.”

“That’s the one,” Marty says with a snap of his fingers, setting the finished rod aside to start pulling the laces on his boots. “Trust you to always know that Jeopardy shit.”

He reaches for the waders Rust had dropped nearby and stands with a little wince, starting the cumbersome task of toeing into the black rubber boots and pulling the legs up past his knees. His coat is too thick to tuck in so he shrugs it off for a moment to hoist the straps up over both shoulders until they rest against the dark fleece of his sweater.

“Well,” Marty says when he’s done, leaning over to get a hand around the fly reel before flashing Rust a lopsided grin. “Do I look the part or what?”

“Better than I ever did,” Rust says, and thinks that’s pretty close to God’s honest truth, eight years spent on a crab trawler aside. Marty’s bright-eyed and proud when Rust knows he himself had only ever looked and felt like a wet rag tied out with an orange crewman’s parka to flap in the arctic wind. “Could fit right in to one of those glossy nature magazines.”

Marty snorts at that but turns and heads for the river current. “You sure you don’t want me to fix you up a pole?” he asks, calling back over one shoulder.

“I’ll take a turn when you want a rest after while,” Rust says, dropping his pack down between his feet. He digs around and pulls his notebook out, the hardbound cover smooth and cold in his hands. “Sit here and watch for a little bit.”

Marty makes his first cast out into the water and Rust takes a graphite pencil in hand. He doesn’t open his ledger yet, only rolls the wood between his fingers and takes a minute to look around. New daylight touches everything as far as the eye can see, but there are a few trees across the water so alight with gold and umber leaves that they almost look like they’re on fire.

Grey pencil won’t do proper justice for those, and after lingering along the rocks and opposite shoreline Rust’s eye turns on a more learned subject instead. He could fill a blank book cover to cover with sketches made in Marty’s image—everything from disembodied hands to the slant of his brow to the curve of his bare back when he’s curled up on one side and sleeping. It’s not any new tradition, and Rust knows he once had scratchy inkpen drawings made in the back of his work ledger that were brought to life from the passenger seat of a Honda, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever tire of it. And after all this time and the road they’ve traveled, it only makes sense to capture him again here and now.

He’s just finished outlining his partner’s shoulders when Marty’s voice breaks through the air.

“About that guy at the bar the other night,” he says, flinging his line back out across the water with a sharp _zip_ as if to carry the thought. “Kinda wish I’d have said some shit to set him straight. Felt like a fucking idiot just sitting there twiddling my thumbs.”

Rust rests his pencil flat against the page and looks up, losing the posture he’d fallen into while drawing. “You still smarting about that?”

“Well it obviously ain’t keeping me up at night, but I was just thinking…” Marty says, and then trails off while he watches his line bob in the water. There’s only the sound of a few birds and the moving current for a few moments, no longer the gentle thrum of white noise. “Why the hell do we let people talk to us like that?” he asks. “When twenty years ago I know damn well you’d have knocked the man’s teeth down his throat without even batting an eyelash. Christ, I’d have probably done the same.”

Rust tries to move back into the headspace he was at Chinook’s, the steady beat of his pulse and his hand gripping his thigh under the table. He could’ve struck first and won—if only for a moment, before the whole rest of the bar turned over and came down on him and Marty both in a trampling cavalry run.

“Being outnumbered, mostly,” he says, and knows that part for a fact. “Other’n that, wasn’t much worth saying that you could’ve thrown at him. People talk—what they say ain’t gonna go and change what we’re doing or what we know.”

“I know it,” Marty says on a sigh. He’s angled just enough that he can see Rust in his peripheral vision, facing west down the curve of the river. “Too damn tired and old to go stirring up fights anymore. Just hate hearing that shit, is all.”

Rust flicks the tip of his pencil and catches the set of Marty’s jaw, squaring it up more than it’d been before. He tries not to smile, head bent over while he sketches a fold in the other man’s coat. “You remember the time we got into it with Geraci at that fundraiser.”

Marty lets out a whoop, shaking his head like it was a good old time with the boys rather than two against ten where they went home bruised and busted to hell. “That’s different,” he says. “I could be plumb near blind with both arms tied around my back and I still wouldn’t turn down the chance to lay a beating on Steve Geraci.”

“Glad we see eye to eye on that,” Rust says after a long moment, and Marty’s answering laughter is a sound that wings through the forest like it belonged there all along.

  
  
  


They stay down by the river until the sun has moved just past its high peak in the sky, warming up the air enough that Marty sheds out of his coat and keeps fishing in nothing but his sweater. It’s still bitterly cold under the cover of shade and Rust stretches out on the bank with his back and rucksack propped against a smooth rock, soaking up whatever sunshine he can before it starts sinking behind the trees.

Two stout fish wind up in the steel bucket and Marty makes a point to throw all the rest back, sliding the hooks from their wide mouths before stooping to drop them in the moving stream. They dart through the water and seem to almost shimmer beneath the surface, scales reflecting the sun like silver-backed glass and emerald.

“Figure it’s about lunchtime,” Marty says when he trudges back up onto the bank and crunches through the gravel until he’s standing before Rust. “Hope you’ve worked up an appetite sunning yourself up here like a big old cat all morning.”

“Reckon I have,” Rust says, tipping his head back to peer at Marty. He holds up a hand to shield his eyes from the sun, mouth pulled into a thoughtful sort of scowl. “Watching you has been plenty enough work.”

Marty cracks a smile, pink in the face and maybe just a little wind-chafed, but happy. “C’mon then,” he says, reaching a hand down to Rust. “Help me haul this shit back up so we can eat something. Think I’ve just about had enough fishing for one day.”

They retrace their own footprints back up to the cabin, finding that the chimney is still spitting up a paltry curl of smoke while a fat red squirrel watches them curiously from the deck. Its tufted ears twitch, black beady eyes unblinking, and the moment Rust stomps on the bottom stair it leaps away and scurries up the closest tree it can find.

Marty sets his bucket down on the wooden ledge and peers into it at the fresh fish, wrinkling his nose up in thought.

“What,” Rust murmurs, unlocking the back door to step inside the kitchenette. He leaves it open so the little gingham half-curtain flutters in the breeze, letting Marty’s voice follow him back in.

“You want these now or later?” Marty asks, reaching up to scratch through his whiskers. “Either way I suppose I’ll be the one cleaning them off and out.”

Rust hums to himself and digs through the cupboards until he finds a cast iron skillet with a fine layer of dust on it. He pulls it out and brings it over to the sink, fishing around for a spare rag. “Can go ahead and eat an early supper,” he says, letting the water slowly warm up. He walks back to the doorway and offers his deal. “If you clean ‘em up, I’ll do the rest.”

“That’s fair enough for me,” Marty says, and reaches into a pocket for his knife. He cleans the scales and guts out with a skilled hand that’s a little out of practice from disuse, but by the time the fish are butter-fried up and seasoned with a little salt and pepper they smell like a dream.

Both men carry their plates outside to settle on the deck, Marty with his dinner balanced on his knees, Rust with his boots kicked up on the railing in the remaining patch of sunlight. The forest birds have grown quieter in the last leg of day, though one screams out a sharp warning call that draws Rust’s eye into the underbrush.

“What is it?” Marty says, sounding halfway wary while Rust stands to get a better view. He only hears the river in the distance but waits, and soon enough the culprit starts rustling through the fallen leaves again.

“Polecat,” Rust says, dropping back down into his chair. At Marty’s muddled expression he pulls the black and white creature’s more common name out. “Skunk.”

“Shit,” Marty sighs, laughing a little as he sets his plate aside. “Had me halfway thinking the Alaskan version of Sasquatch was about to pop out of the bushes and grab us.”

Rust’s mouth tugs up on one side while he lazily studies the back of his left hand. “You know they say there’ve been sightings in these parts,” he says. “Some of the real old timers can remember seeing it far back as they can remember.”

“No fucking shit,” Marty says, leaning in closer. “What do they say?”

“Say he stands a foot taller than a normal man, probably twice as broad,” Rust says, squinting out across the forest. “Further north they’ve been known to slaughter a whole sled team in the night, ransack the supply runs. Reason they don’t ever catch the beast is because it can camouflage itself—blends right in with the terrain.”

“What, in the snow?”

“He grows out a white winter coat starting around this time of year, sheds it again in the spring. Me and Pop used to stuff our bedrolls with it.”

Marty’s face only falls at the last part, and he kicks a boot out to the side so it knocks into Rust’s chair leg. “I bet you get a real kick out of spinning me a yarn, huh,” he says, voice splintered by his own laughter. “You little shit.”

“Not my fault you go and fall for it,” Rust says, feeling mirth rumble up in his chest until it breaks free, and when Marty stands up to slap his shoulder with a holler full of put-on outrage he only ducks his head and grins harder.

  
  
  


The day wears on until dusk creeps in over the mountains, falling across their boots where they sit on the deck. Echoes of the lone radio station murmur low from inside and a pot of hot coffee perches on the squat little table between them, set alongside the empty wrappers of a few Little Debbie cakes.

Rust’s ledger is closed and resting across his thighs, pencil wedged in between the pages. Marty has both hands wrapped around a coffee cup and both men have their eyes on the horizon, not obliged into doing or saying anything but watching the sky darken and shift between violet and indigo.

“Do you think we could live up here?” Marty asks, a low and casual question even though Rust know he’s been mulling it over in his head for the past few minutes. “Like a full-time thing.”

Rust blinks and shifts a little so his chair creaks some underneath him, pulling in an easy sort of breath. “Is this a matter of if we could, or if I’d want to?”

“If we could do it on sheer principle,” Marty says, bringing his coffee up to rest against his mouth. “Think I already know you aren’t interested in keeping permanent quarters in a place where snow hits the ground.”

“Hmm,” Rust hums, running a thumb along the weathered edge of his notebook. “Don’t see why we couldn’t swing it.” He turns and appraises Marty through the dwindling daylight, heavy eyes trying to decipher something that may show itself on his face. “What’s got you thinking about that?”

Marty shrugs a bit, blowing out a quiet sigh as he balances his mug on his bad knee. “Oh, I don’t know,” he says. He looks out into the forest and then up at the horizon again before he really answers. “Just feel like nothing’s really—well, nothing’s too different from how it is at home, you know. Like all that’s changed is the scenery.”

“What were you expecting to be different?” Rust asks, eyes narrowing the barest bit.

“I don’t mean it like a bad thing,” Marty says, glancing over real quick. “It’s a good thing, I reckon. How…uh, easy things are, despite being across the damn country in the middle of nowhere. How we just keep to the same old, y’know.”

Rust’s lip quirks up once he deciphers what Marty means, and it’s getting too dark to tell but he knows the other man’s cheeks are tinged pinker. “Well you know a change of fuckin’ scenery isn’t gonna be too big an influence on all that.”

“Guess I just feel like it would for other people,” Marty mumbles, waving a dismissive sort of hand through the air. “And I know we ain’t exactly ‘other people,’ but sometimes this shit seems too easy.”

_Too easy_. Rust is both old friends and enemies with that thought, and shit knows he’s battled himself on it since the first night he touched a bare foot down past the threshold of Marty’s front door. And he knows Marty only means Alaska, only means the difference between here and Louisiana, but Rust can’t help but see beyond the margins of here and there. Too damn easy. It feels bigger to him, somehow.

“I don’t think there’s any real use in questioning it anymore,” he says, blinking against raw dusk, nose full of pine musk and wood smoke. “I’ve had my fair share of trying to whittle the fucking truth out of nothing, and sometimes there ain’t any good reason behind the way shit is, or why it happens. Maybe it all happens because it just is, man.”

Marty looks over, crease between his brow deepened into something thoughtful. “What are you talking about?”

Rust settles deeper in his chair, hand still slowly tracing the spine of his notebook in an afterthought. “What I’m saying is, you and me could go anywhere and do any fucking thing in this world, and we wound up choosing each other.”

“You think we did that because it was _easy?_ ” Marty asks, and there it is, just the barest hint of something bruised hidden in the well of his voice. Rust tastes sodden maroon in the back of his throat like an overripe fig and frowns, gently shaking his head.

“Yes and no,” he says, surprised at how soft the words fall between them. Marty’s eyes are on him and not a thing else. “Too easy because it was what I wanted, Marty—I used to think that way about it in the beginning. But now I tend to lean toward thinking we wound up the way we did because it was right.”

Somebody breathes out a sigh and Rust isn’t sure if it’s him or Marty, maybe the both of them all at once. It’s so dark now that the only lights are the single porch lantern glowing dirty amber and the rising stars. Marty clears his throat and stands, making the deck chair skid an inch or two back on the planking.

“We ought to head in,” he says, quiet. “So damn dark out here I can’t see past the first step.”

A faint ache tugs somewhere behind Rust’s ribcage but he carefully nods, standing up and holding his ledger close to one side. “All right,” he says, and turns to pass through the front door without another word.

He goes to the fireplace and bends to pull a piece of tinder from the stack, watching the flames lick up around the embers already glowing in the hearth. The cabin’s door swings shut and locks but Marty’s boots don’t thump and creak across the floorboards.

“I was scared in the beginning, y’know,” Marty says after a long moment of silence. Rust doesn’t look up yet but he goes still, listening. “Christ knows it’s hard to admit that even know, but I was goddamn terrified about what I wanted. What I was feeling. Going to bed every night and—and praying…well.”

Rust turns to look over his shoulder and finds Marty leaning back against the closed door, watching him with bright eyes. “Praying,” Rust echoes, straightening up again. “About what?”

Marty lets out a breathless little laugh, a short-lived sound that’s swiftly replaced with his voice steepened into something serious. He opens his mouth and then closes it again, taking a single step forward before stopping, and Rust wonders what locked doors they’ve still got left between them even now.

“Praying that you wouldn’t leave again,” Marty says, just like that, and then reaches up to press a tired hand over his eyes as if to hide in the wake of his own revelation. “Being a selfish and sad fucking bastard, I suppose, about what I wanted and not what you might’ve—”

He doesn’t quite finish that thought, because Rust is across the room and on him in an instant, and anything that was left to say is muffled when they collide hard enough that Marty sees stars wheel and burst behind his eyes.

“Did you ever ask me what it was I wanted back then,” Rust says, getting Marty by the shirtfront and pushing him back against the door, nipping the words at the corner of his mouth in a sudden fervor. “Did you hear what I fucking said outside?”

Marty feels dazed and invigorated all at once, buzzing with Rust’s body pressed along the full length of his own even though they’re still wrapped in their coats. “I—” he tries to say, but then Rust’s hands are shoving up under his flannel to grip around his sides, a shock of burning warmth and a pinch of cold gold that makes words wither in his throat.

“I wanted you so bad I thought I was losing my fucking mind,” Rust says, breathing gone faintly ragged. “So goddamn bad, Marty, I didn’t think I—I didn’t think I could ever deserve it. Not even the sheer fucking idea.”

His hands slide up around Marty’s ribs and the older man sucks in a short gust of air. Standing this close their eyes are almost level, except Marty has to look up the barest fraction to meet Rust’s gaze. A single inch between them. He always forgets their height difference until Rust tilts the world enough to show him.

“Maybe you deserved better,” Marty says, low but unwavering. Rust’s lashes dip and he closes his eyes, shaking his head at that, but Marty keeps watching him. “I just thank God I finally found the good sense to hold on to you and not let go.”

“You wanted me to stay,” Rust says, eyes still shut, thumb tracing one of Marty’s ribs beneath his shirt though he doesn’t even really know he’s doing it.

“Well,” Marty says, voice warm in Rust’s ear. “That, and I wanted you.”

Rust isn’t fully expecting the kiss when it comes, but he allows it—even more than that, he opens wide and falls into it, deepens it, feeling Marty’s arms come up to circle around his back even though they’re both slumped against the cabin door. They breathe hotly against one another and Rust swears aloud, feeling a rush of static along his skin when Marty bites at the hinge of his jaw.

“I’d lay awake at night and think about you, Marty,” he says, and Rust can’t find a good reason other than his own pride to stop now. “Touch myself like some lovesick fucking teenager sometimes and just dream and wonder.”

Marty groans at that and Rust drags his hands down to his beltline, crashing into Marty with another kiss. He starts undoing the buckle of the other man’s belt, frantic enough to nearly fumble his movements.

“Told myself you’d never want it like that,” Rust keeps on, and then Marty’s hands are trying to push his coat off his shoulders, the two of them twisted up in a tangle of want and hurry. “Resigned myself into thinking it was just a—another fucking trick my mind was playing on me.”

“Hush and help me get this coat off before I have a stroke,” Marty says, and Rust is suddenly aware of sweat beginning to bead and prickle at his own back. “If you don’t hurry up and get your hands on me, Rust, I swear to Christ.”

Rust chokes out something that sounds halfway like a laugh and all the rest like relief, but he does as Marty asks. They tear their coats off in a hurry to leave them on the floor and then Rust has got Marty’s pants down and boxers shoved around his thighs, making good time when he wedges a knee between Marty’s legs and then stops to start undoing his own belt.

“What’re we—?” Marty starts, eyes dropped down low to watch, and then Rust takes the both of their lengths in one hand in a movement that shouldn’t have been so easy, but the second their skin touches Marty sends up a silent prayer that it was.

“Oh shit,” he rasps, reaching up to brace a hand on Rust’s shoulder. “Oh hell, Rust.”

Rust tests their combined weight in his hand, gives a gentle squeeze that makes a shudder roll through his body. He already feels too sensitive and they’ve barely even started, but still gives way when temptation bids him to peer down at where he holds them both in his hand.

Marty’s cock was always wider, a heavier girth but never quite as long as his own—and now, already flushed rosy to match the heat crawling up his neck and into the height of his cheekbones. Rust gives a shallow thrust of his hips and revels in the friction between them, how the softness of delicate skin feels like hot silk in his hand.

He starts working them properly now, leaned back in close to kiss at Marty’s mouth while they both fuck into the roughened warmth of his palm. “Did you ever touch yourself for me back then, Marty,” he asks, running the pad of his thumb down to the tip of Marty’s cock. “Think about my hands on you like this.”

“You know I did, you bastard,” Marty groans, fingers digging into Rust’s shoulder. His eyes are clenched shut now, focused on the sensation of Rust on and all around him. “Always got to the task at hand quicker than you’d be mouthing off, though.”

Rust slows the pace some, gives them one long and languid stroke that’s got Marty swearing dirty in his ear. He can feel tension starting to wind up and gather as his skin tightens, and when Marty’s hips start stuttering he knows they aren’t going to last much longer pressed together like this.

“Come on, Marty,” Rust says, bracing his free hand against the cold wooden door. He’s moving on something closer to instinct now, trying to wring it out of the both of them. “I got you now.”

It ends with one final twist, sweet as can be, and Rust’s name gone velvet and heavy on Marty’s tongue. They rock against one another as the high lingers and then wears thin, and then there’s nothing left but a mess wiped on the undershirt Rust will have to wash in the tub later, and two men slumped against one another in all manner of wrung-out disarray.  

“Don’t think you ever told me any of that,” Marty croaks after a while, breathing fast but steady. Rust’s forehead is pressed against his shoulder but he doesn’t move, panting a hot spot there against soft fleece.

“Don’t know if I ever really planned to,” Rust says, still hiding his expression. “Cat’s out of the fucking bag now, though.”

Marty tries and fails to wipe a smile off his face, though he reaches up to rest a palm at the back of Rust’s neck, briefly thumbing through the damp curls there. “Wasn’t nothing I couldn’t figure out on my own considering I was right there behind you, slick.”

Rust slowly draws his head back up, eyes full of something pliant and sated. He reaches up to fix the neckline of Marty’s sweater and then steps back to tuck himself into some semblance of order, though he leaves his belt undone and clinking while he moves.

“Call it a draw, then,” he says softly, and lets his fingertips skim across Marty’s chest before he walks back over to the fireplace to throw on another log.

Marty reaches up to start pawing at his clothes and lets out a wide yawn. He pushes off the door with a wince and reaches up to massage the back of his head where he’d been pushed into the door, gingerly pressing the tender spot. “Think you’ve gone and tapped me out for the night,” he says, though his voice doesn’t ring with anything but its usual warmth and contentment. “Surprised I’m still standing as it is.”

Rust has moved across the room to duck behind the folding screen, and the faucet rumbles and squeaks before the shower starts up. Marty hears him slowly getting undressed one piece of clothing at a time, knows Rust is folding his flannel and jeans in half to set aside but dropping his underwear and socks in piles on the floor.

He’s trying to decide whether he should just strip naked and go straight to bed or set up temporary shop in front of the fire when Rust takes a step back to look around the screen. His expression is drawn plain except for a slow blink that doesn’t give much of anything away. “You gonna come wash up or what?”

Marty’s first thought has the merit of being colored with past experiences, but he still feels like he needs to be sure. “Thought you were fixing to.”

“I was.”

Marty shrugs out of his shirt but doesn’t move forward yet, draping the soft material over the crook of his elbow. “Will the two of us even fucking fit in there?”

“Dunno,” Rust says, disappearing again behind the screen. Steam is starting to billow and puff on the air and Marty hears the telltale clink of the shower curtain being pulled along the metal rod. “I’m guessin’ we’re gonna find that out here in a second.”

  
  
  


The radio is back on again, songs weaving in and out of softened static like a sleepy ocean tide. It’s been dark for a few good hours now, though the room is still glowing with the orange flicker of firelight in one corner and a single lamp in the other. Rust is lying down on the bed with his eyes closed, somewhere between asleep and awake. He shifts beneath the sheets and heavy quilt until his calves meet the coolness of fabric not yet warmed with body heat. Marty is sitting up beside him with his reading glasses low on his nose, flipping through the paperback he’d found in the side table drawer with idle interest.

“This ain’t exactly what I’d be apt to call classic reading,” Marty says, licking at a thumb to turn between two pages. “In the sense that it seems to be turning out like something you’d see on Jerry Springer.”

“What’re you looking at?” Rust asks, eyes cracking open the barest bit. He’s been walking along the edges of something like a daydream for a while, preoccupied with not much more than the sensation of where he is and the sound of Marty’s fingertips on the yellowed paper.

Marty lets out a snort, face pinched up in a mild scowl. He holds up the book so Rust can make out _Wuthering Heights_ fading on the cover. “For one thing the dude’s fucking crazy, but I reckon that’s just the short and sweet of it.”

“Most people in those old romances are,” Rust says. His eyes drift shut again, bare shoulders curved in where he’s curled up on one side. He hadn’t bothered to put on a shirt before sliding into bed and Marty can pick out a few sparse freckles peeking above where the blanket’s been pulled up for warmth. Just below that, at home and ever-present, is that blue tattoo above Rust’s heart.

Marty’s studied it a thousand and one times and probably even more. Abstract but deceptively simple—like a magician’s puzzle, almost. A riddle without clues that’s been loitering in his peripherals for twenty years. He doesn’t really know why he’s never asked.

The book returns to its home in the bedside drawer, tucked away for somebody else to find on a future trip. Rust draws in a deep, sighing breath and turns over onto his back so the light bleeds over and touches the ink.

“What is that thing?” Marty says without any preamble, waiting until Rust’s eyes slide open to peer up at him. He pulls his reading glasses off and sets them aside.

“What thing?”

“This,” Marty says, suddenly emboldened, reaching across to draw the tip of his middle finger down the symbol on Rust’s chest. “I know you told Audrey a while back, that one weekend—said it was a Nordic rune or some shit, but I looked that mess up and be damned if I can find the resemblance.”

“You looked it up?” Rust asks, a touch of something warm in his voice.

Marty huffs out a laugh and lets his eyes and hand drop into the soft bedding between them. “Well, _yeah,_ ” he says. “I know how to type something into the fucking computer. And as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, this doesn’t look like a spoke on the wheel of whatever that Vegvísir thing is.”

Rust hums in the back of his throat and his eyes glitter like beetle wings in the low light, one glancing flash before he’s tipping his head back and closing them against the ceiling. He remembers Audrey’s sharp eyes, so much like Marty’s, studying it from behind her easel like it was an iron lock she didn’t have the key to.

“You’re right,” he says. “It’s not the Vegvísir.”

“Go figure,” Marty grouses, even though he hunkers down on his side so he’s facing Rust. “And don’t tell me a bunch of blue pick-up sticks, now. Imagine you’ve always been a little too highfalutin with your symbolism for that.”

One of Rust’s hands moves to trace over the lines by memory, up the length of the cross and along the peak of its open triangle. “It’s just reminder now, more than anything,” he murmurs. “Artifact, guess you could say.”

Marty watches and waits, not pressing him along any further. If he’d learned anything in a decade alone, it was the twilight gift of being patient. Two years spent living with Rustin Cohle had only driven the lesson home.

Rust reaches up to briefly skim a finger along his brow, like he’s got to find something that hasn’t been brought to the forefront of his mind in a long while. His hand moves back down to cover the tattoo on his chest and Marty thinks of those holy men they’ve seen in documentary films, who can only speak their truisms through the power of some hallowed relic.

“It’s meant to represent a suspension,” Rust says at last. “Between two worlds, between ignorance and the attainment of wisdom. Neither here nor there, but caught in the snare trap of sacrificing oneself in order to pursue a higher vision.”

There’s a beat of quiet, not anything uncomfortable. Marty clears his throat and looks at the back of Rust’s hand, a smile wavering around his mouth. “Is that something else you found in a book?”

“Not quite,” Rust drawls, unbothered. “Tarot card was where I first saw it.”

“How’s that?”

“Rent girl holed up with me in a motel room one night when the Crusaders were in town,” Rust says, sliding his hand down to his stomach to uncover the tattoo again. “And there wasn’t any fucking thing to do but pound blow and watch five channels on the TV, so she brought out her bag of tricks out and read my cards after we did a line or two.”

Marty lets out a soft guffaw. “Don’t guess I’d expect tarot cards to be in a prostitute’s repertoire of offered services.”

“Maybe not for most of her usual clientele,” Rust says, and Marty sees the barest little twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth, but then it’s gone again. “But I picked three cards in light of the present and she laid them out—and I can’t figure the other two anymore, but one was what she called the hanged man.”

Any of the humor hanging around Marty’s face from before is quickly wiped clean. “The hanged man.”

“Sacrifice and surrender,” Rust says. “He’s suspended through inversion, but has found the possibility of enlightenment.” He goes quiet for a minute, looking somewhere along the beams in the ceiling. “It made too much fucking sense, least back then, so I took it and simplified it into a symbol only I would recognize. Another form of personal meditation, in a way.”

“I’ve seen the card before,” Marty says, scratching along the bridge of his nose. “I don’t like the sound of it, but I know what you’re talking about.”

Rust’s sleepy eyes move to find his. “I wouldn’t peg you for the type to get your fortune told, Marty.”

“Probably right about that, but Audrey had a deck of those things when she got into high school,” Marty says, getting a far-off look in his eye for a moment. His gaze drops back to the blue tattoo on Rust’s chest again, almost meditative. “Somehow, only card I kept pulling out was the fool.”

“Our fortunes precede us,” Rust says, and grins when Marty reaches out to jab him in the ticklish spot between his ribs and hipbone.

“So tell me,” Marty says, tapping two fingers against the tattoo above Rust’s heart. “Has this hanged man of yours found his enlightenment yet?”

“It took a long time,” Rust says, letting out an easy breath. “But I think he has.”  
  


* * *  
  


  
Breakfast and coffee is on the table just after first light, filling up the cabin with the smell of hot bacon and eggs. Marty’d put a few pieces of bread in the tiny toaster oven to brown up, and he sits buttering one at the kitchen table while Rust sits across from him, peering at an atlas spread open across his thighs.

“Wanted to take you into town today,” he says, tracing along the contour of a road Marty can’t see with his index finger. “Not Fairbanks proper, but down in Fox Hollow where I grew up. Bout twenty-five miles out, give or take.”

Marty chews around a bite of toast, trying to crane his neck around to look at the atlas. “You got anywhere in particular you wanted to visit?”

“Figured we might have to make two days of it, divvy up between town and then out where—out where my Pop used to live,” Rust says. “He’d be a-ways off the beaten path, further out in the sticks. We’ll crawl up on Aya’s place along the main road before we get anywhere near the old homestead.”

The atlas is folded and set aside so Rust can turn his attention back to the breakfast still steaming in front of him. He palms the hot sauce and holds it over his eggs, posed thoughtful for a moment. “We can probably stop there today on the way, pay her a short visit.”

“Color me curious about how you got to know this woman,” Marty says, leaning back in his chair with a half-eaten piece of bacon to watch Rust. “I figure she’s somebody important to you, above a lot of other folks, considering I keep hearing her name.”

“Suppose that’s true,” Rust says, reaching for his fork with his eyes cast low. “Told you I’ve known her since I was a kid.”

“When’s the last time you saw her?”

“Mmm,” Rust hums, going still while he turns the years over in his head. “Probably sitting past a decade, now. Not since I first got back up here in ’02.”

Marty nods, brushing crumbs off his fingers into a dishtowel on his lap. O-two, and if that ain’t the most loaded pair of syllables he’s come to brush with in his life. He wonders if he has a reputation with people he’s never met—if Rust would talk about how things went sour, if he’d mention Marty’s name in passing, but then again Rust never talked. At least not about the things that cut him the most.

“I guess it’s on me to make a good impression, then,” Marty says, and leaves that as it is. “Take all the time you need to visit, you know I ain’t in any big hurry to get anywhere.”

“You put an idea like that in Aya’s head, she might not let us leave,” Rust says, reaching for his coffee. “You’ll like it out there, though. Don’t imagine it’s changed much in forty years, much less ten.”

“What makes you say that?” Marty asks, narrowing his eyes. “That I’d like it.”

“Figure I’ve got a good enough read on you by now,” Rust says, watching Marty make a skeptical face over his coffee cup, even though he doesn’t make any move to deny it. “You’ll have to see when we get there.”

  
  


The temperature dropped another few degrees overnight, a change highlighted by the lack of sunlight filtering through a steely cloud cover masking the sky. Both men had broken out their long johns without much hesitation edgewise, layering up with flannel and wool socks before buttoning up into their coats. Even in the truck cab Marty keeps his hat pulled down low over his ears, hands bundled up in the old red scarf he’d pulled from the cabin dresser before following Rust out the door.

The miles stretch on while the trees bordering the highway grow thicker the further they move from the city. Twenty miles outside Fairbanks and Marty’s starting to wonder if they’ll ever see civilization again when Rust points with his middle finger through the windshield at something driven into the ground.

“That’d be the place,” he says, slowing to ease off onto a path worn into the shoulder of the road. The thing he’d been pointing out reveals itself as they get closer, and Marty can see a rusted length of what looks like steel piping fixed with the silhouette of a running horse on top. It spins a little in the cold wind as they pass, like the whole thing had been fashioned from an old weathervane retired from its original post.

“Horse people,” Marty murmurs, maybe more to himself than Rust, but the other man still hums in quiet agreement.

The road has been paved but it’s riddled with potholes and grooves, too many years spent weathering the elements without being patched back up again, and Rust has to slow the truck to a crawl to keep from rattling the cab like a tin can.

When the road gives way to a single driveway, its mouth is guarded by an iron farm gate standing wide open, painted a bright red with old horseshoes nailed to the post it’s hinged on. A mailbox stands silent sentinel, half-rusted itself with a broken red flag raised in salute. The lane beyond disappears back through the trees and Rust pulls off onto the grass before killing the engine.

“Be better to walk the rest of the way,” he says, looking over at Marty’s clouded expression. “It ain’t too far, and I’d rather not get the tires caught up in a mud hole.”

“We’re gonna look like a couple vagrants walking up on foot,” Marty says, though he tosses over the scarf in his lap before he opens his door. “Put that around your neck so you don’t catch cold.”

Rust picks up the scarf and as ugly as it is, it’s softer than he would’ve thought. “I’m not wearing this thing,” he says. “Don’t even know who it fucking belongs to.”

“They left it behind, so I reckon it belongs to you now,” Marty says. “If you don’t put it on I don’t wanna see your ass shivering one time out there.”

“Whatever you say, Marty,” Rust sighs, though when he slides down out of the truck he’s still got the scarf in hand, and by the time they pass through the gate it’s already draped around the back of his neck.

The lane leading back to the house is nothing but dirt and gravel, lined on both sides by barbwire fencing. Wide puddles linger with standing water and they sidestep around them as they go, watching the outline of a homestead take shape up ahead. The fence ends just as soon as it started, leaving nothing but wooded pasture beneath the heavy tree canopy, and before Marty even knows what he’s seeing they spot a few visitors trampling through the leaves to greet them.

“Abram must be home,” is all Rust says, stopping to watch the approaching creatures.

Doe-eyed and long in the ears, the first to step forward is a jenny mule the color of wet slate. She bumps her nose right into Marty’s shoulder and he lets out a startled laugh, pushing a hand against her flank.

“What on earth?” he says, watching as another mule walks up behind the first, and then another with a friend close on its heels. Their dark eyes are like chocolate, soft and curious while they come in for a closer look. Rust reaches up to pat one on the neck and waits while two or three more start coming up from further out in the trees, ears bobbing and tails swishing while they walk.

“Remember how I said Aya’s son works with forestry a lot,” Rust says, holding his ground while a sorrel jack mule starts nibbling around the edge of his scarf. “He leads a pack line up through the mountains in the spring and summertime—carries supplies and shit on his mules where the nature reserves don’t let vehicles travel, or where they can’t.”

“Jesus,” Marty says, marveling a little at the herd of creatures standing around them. There’s probably eight or ten that he can see, maybe more still loitering nearby in the woods. “And he just lets them wander free like this?”

“Naw, they don’t ever roam far from the horse,” Rust says, briefly looking up to scan through the clearing. “Should be around here somewhere.”

As sure as the world, further up the path they find a pretty buckskin grazing through the scrappy underbrush, wearing a leather collar and brass bell around her neck. She’s already starting to grow shaggy under the promise of cooler weather and looks up when Rust and Marty walk past, showing off a white star on her forehead.

Marty whistles to the mare and she doesn’t budge or blink, though the mules are happy to rush back up when he calls. Two jacks as brown as seals nip and kick at one another before loping off toward the trees, but the grey lady from before stays close and bows her head to let Marty scratch around both ears.

“Y’all sure are a friendly bunch,” he says, grinning while he rubs love pats along the mule’s ivory face. “Careful now, might make somebody jealous.”

Rust doesn’t even bother to cut his eyes over at that, though he gently leans into the mule’s side while he listens to the echoed sound of blunt chopping ring between the trees. It’s further out in the forest somewhere, a steady thrum like a slow metronome’s heartbeat, and then after a few moments it stops altogether.

“Somebody’s coming,” Marty says. Not nervous, but wary enough in the sudden quiet.

“Mmhmm,” Rust answers, a low sound in his chest.

They never hear any footsteps to signal his arrival, but then a dark-haired man is stepping from between the trunks of two white birches. He carries a heavy axe in one hand, the blade idly swinging down by his calf while he walks. Rust looks up and takes a slow step forward, and when the man finally recognizes him his face goes pale with disbelief before it breaks into a wide smile.

“Abram,” Rust says, keeping his clasped hands low at his waist.

“Rust—Rustin Cohle?” Abram says, almost immediately dropping the axe against a tree trunk. He reaches up and presses a hand against his chest, looking between Rust and Marty with question growing behind his eyes. “Holy shit, man, I feel like I’m seeing a ghost.”

“Could be,” Rust says with a small smile, reaching out to grasp Abram’s hand after they shoo a few of the mules away. “It’s been long enough.”

“You could’ve called ahead and spared me the heart attack,” Abram says with a laugh, rocking back on his heels. “We’re not so backwoods out here that we don’t have a landline at the house.”

Rust inclines his head a bit, and from where Marty’s standing it looks like an echo of old humility. “Sorry about that,” he says, briefly biting into his bottom lip. “I thought about it, but then figured it’d be nice to surprise Aya.”

“Ma probably knew you were here long before I did,” Abram says, and then steps up to take Marty’s hand in kind. “Who do I owe the pleasure to, sir?”

Rust clears his throat, reaching up to briefly touch Marty’s elbow. “This is my partner, Martin Hart.”

Marty introduces himself with a smile, and then makes a gesture that encompasses the land and animals surrounding them. “This is a really fine place you got out here,” he says. “Don’t know if I’ve ever felt so welcome.”

“Cricket there will try her damndest to convince you she’s a lapdog,” Abram says, tipping his head toward the grey mule still standing nearby. “But I appreciate that—I’ve been keeping it up best I can since my dad passed. I was born and raised out here, so I don’t intend on letting it go anytime soon.”

“You got anybody helping you run the place?” Rust asks, eyes strayed to some fresh mending done on a nearby fence.

“It’s still just me and Ma,” Abram says on a small sigh. “I got a man who comes up with me on hauls when we’re in the mountains, a girl I see in town sometimes—but otherwise it’s just the two of us and the herd.”

A bell jostles and dings as the buckskin mare ambles back up to greet Abram, and he rubs a hand along her nose before turning to pick up his abandoned axe. “Well, let’s get on up to the house,” he says. “I’ll get you two settled in and then I’ve got to head back out and throw some hay.”

He turns and leads the way, walking through the leaves almost as silently as he came. Abram isn’t a short man, exactly—maybe an inch below Marty but even broader in the shoulders. His face and hands are olive turned dark from working in the sun, though there’s a hatched design of intricate black tattooed at the base of each wrist.

The paddock and barn they pass first are built with raw timber, so dark and gnarled with age that they almost look petrified. A few hens strut around the yard and scratch in the dirt while a black billy goat jumps up on a tree stump to watch the newcomers walk by. The house itself is a handsome log cabin, old and weather-beaten but likely just as sturdy as the day it was built. Chimes made from scrap metal and wood sway and tinkle in the breeze, and white smoke puffs out of a brick chimney at the peak of the roof. The only thing breaking the scene into modernity is the dually pickup parked in the yard and a power box and pole situated on the far side of the cabin.

Abram pauses at the foot of a stoop at the side of the house, turning to address both men with a lowered voice. “Her sight is gone now,” he says, meeting Rust’s eye first. “Doesn’t get around much these days beyond the front gate, but that won’t do much to stop her. Keeps the dog with her a lot.”

Rust’s face is unreadable for the moment, held at a careful note of impassiveness. “You think she’ll remember me?”

That rouses a laugh from Abram, and he shakes his head before starting up the wooden steps. “Think you’ll find she’s just as sharp and determined as she ever was, my friend. So don’t try and hide anything if you can help it.”

It doesn’t sound like a threat or a warning, more of a friendly joke than anything, but Rust still catches Marty’s eye and lets a look pass between them. “C’mon,” he says, urging Marty ahead of him. “I’m behind you.”

They pass through a red-washed door into a cramped mudroom, and beyond that the entryway opens up into a bright kitchen washed over with warmth coming from a pot-bellied stove. The icebox is powder blue and dated, likely nearly Marty’s age by the looks of it. A black and tan shepherd dog looks up from where it’d been sprawled on the floor by the heating grate, and it gives one lone thump of its tail before standing and going to sit at attention by the kitchen table.

Aya reaches out to touch the palm of her creased hand against the dog’s head, and it lies down by her feet without a sound. She looks toward the mudroom doorway but doesn’t see, eyes clouded and milky but still somehow piercing. “Abram,” she says, in a clear voice hardly touched by age. “Who are our two guests?”

“A wayward pair of travelers,” Abram says, smiling enough that she can hear his jest. He walks across the kitchen and reaches for a tea kettle before starting to fill it up at the sink. “I think you might already know one of them.”

Marty watches the line of Rust’s throat work for a moment before he steps forward. “Hello, Aya,” he says, pitched quiet. “It’s been a long time.”

“Rustin,” the old woman says without pause, immediately smiling to herself. “Still as modest as the little boy I used to know, I see.”

She holds out a hand and Rust takes it between both of his own before squatting down in front of her, careful not to nudge the dog. “It’s good to see you again,” he says.

“I knew you would come back, _ada_ ,”Aya tells him, bringing up her other hand to squeeze his left. “And not alone, either.”

Rust nods and straightens back up, turning to beckon Marty closer. “I—I brought Marty with me, this time around. Marty Hart.”

Aya takes Marty’s hand as well and gently inclines her head, making her silver braids nearly pool in her lap. Behind them, Abram finishes putting the kettle on and silently takes his leave, the mudroom door faintly squeaking as he steps back into the autumn day.

“Please sit down, both of you,” Aya says, pointing to the empty chairs across from her at the table. “We’ll have tea and coffee in just a few minutes.”

They quickly mind her and settle at the table after shrugging out of their coats, draping them over the chair backs. Marty clears his throat a bit and looks between the old woman and his partner, feeling almost as if there is a conversation taking place that he hasn’t yet heard. Even though she’s blind Rust still looks into her eyes whether he’s speaking or not, and they seem to watch one another in their own way, perhaps one that doesn’t rely on sight alone.

“I feel as if ten years is a length of time where there is either too much or too little to tell,” Aya says after a moment. “From my eyes, I suppose it feels like no time has passed at all.” The room stays quiet save for the hum of the heating tea kettle, and the old woman smiles while she folds her hands on the tabletop. Both men can see a plain gold band worn on her left hand. “But for you, I suspect much has changed since we last met.”

“You could say that,” Rust says. He looks out the window at their right, fogged up enough from the stove heat that it seems to stream sunlight through a filter. “Most of any change I’ve found was in the last two years rather than the ten before it. Think I owe Marty for most of that.”

Marty feels a little jolt of something deep in his gut—maybe it’s a shade of pride or a pang of modesty, or maybe it’s something altogether softer than that. Across the table Aya doesn’t turn his way, but her lined mouth turns up at the corner.

“I am glad to know it,” she says. “In the face of many odds a strong spirit will always find its way back to the light, given time. I believe I have told you as much before.”

Something on Rust’s face wavers at that, and though his gaze drifts it doesn’t linger for long. “You did,” he says, quieter than before. “The last time I was here.”

Aya nods, making the silver baubles in her ears shimmer and shine. The kettle whistles and she rises up to move toward the stove, sidestepping the sleepy shepherd dog to turn off the coiled burner. She opens a cupboard by memory and pulls down three mugs of a kind, carefully carrying them and the pot of hot water back over to settle on a folded dishtowel.

After honey and milk are on the table, she settles back in front of Rust and Marty and opens a battered tea tin before bringing it up to her nose. The smell is so strong that it seems to surround them, something heady and black but with a slight sweetness on top.

“Well then,”Aya says, gesturing for each man to take a cup. “Tell me about some of these changes you have found together.”

  
  
  


They sit and pass conversation around the table until the tea kettle grows cool to the touch. Abram thuds in and out of the kitchen between his errands, stopping to pull up a chair and eat a cold sandwich before adding a few logs to the stove. He excuses himself after a while, buttoning back into his coat before disappearing into the barn.

“His favorite cow is due to have a little one soon,” Aya says, as if she knew where he was headed on instinct. “I told him all his restlessness will only make the calf shy to show itself, but he’s just as bull-minded as his father was when it comes to his animals.”

“Abram said your husband passed a few years back,” Marty says. “This is a beautiful place you two built here. I know your son is proud to keep it.”

Aya smiles at that, something soft and full of recollection. “It wasn’t easy to build our home here,” she says. “Abram’s father was a white man— _gasht'ana_ , as my people say. The marriage was not something my family or Dena'ina ancestors encouraged, and the men made things very difficult for my Joseph for a while.”

“We lost some livestock in the exchange,” she says, not delving any further into the conflict. “It wasn’t until Abram was born that we found peace enough to begin a livelihood here.”

Aya is quiet for a moment, and then looks toward Rust again. “Your father came once, in the winter,” she says. “When I was still carrying Abram, and Joseph had gone to work a job in town.”

Rust blinks at that, carefully studying the planes of her face. “What for?”

“You had taken ill and he came to borrow medicine,” the old woman says. “There was ice on the mountain road and it was safer for him to walk here on foot than risk driving into town.”

“If Abram wasn’t born yet, I must’ve been small still,” Rust says, a small crease pulling between his eyes. “Maybe four, almost five—not much older than that.”

“Yes,”Aya says, thinking back. “He walked through the snow all that way. I tried to get him to warm himself by the fire before he went back out into the cold but he wouldn’t hear it. He said he had to get home and tend to you.”

Rust shakes his head, a ghost of a smile hanging around his mouth. “Stubborn old bastard.”

Aya laughs at that, a sound not alike the ptarmigan bird. “You aren’t so unlike him, Rustin Cohle,” she says. “I have a few old memories Martin might like to hear.”

“You don’t say,” Marty says, sliding a sideways look over toward Rust, who doesn’t do much more than arch an eyebrow. “I’d love to hear them.”

“Hmm,” Aya hums, settling back in her chair. “I recall a time when Abram was just learning to walk—perhaps the second winter after the one when Travis came for medicine. It was in the middle of the afternoon, and I hear a faint knocking on the kitchen door. I went to open it up with the baby on my hip and who do I find, hardly big enough to fill his boots?”

“Here we go,” Rust sighs, though he braces his elbows on the table to hold his head up while he listens. “That was the first time I cut out of class. Got in a fight out on the schoolyard.”

“I knew you weren’t up to any good, but I didn’t have the heart to turn you away,”Aya says. She tips her head toward Marty as if she’s letting him in on a secret between them, almost whispering. “He looked like a little soldier, blackened eye and all.”

“They ganged up on me,” Rust says, making an indifferent sort of gesture. “Wasn’t a fair fight.”

“You were always outnumbered,” Aya says, frowning faintly. “And so I told you to come inside and eat something by the stove. I don’t know if I ever knew such a thin child, before then or since.”

“You fed me more than just the once,” Rust says, something warmer in his voice. “You and Joseph were good people. And Abram, now. Still are.”

Aya’s expression softens some, but she holds up a finger to gently waggle through the air. “But there’s more to the story yet,” she says with a small laugh. “Don’t think that I would forget about you going back out into the yard and finding the snow shovel.”

“What he did,” Aya says, looking toward Marty again, “was go out and shovel hard snow off the lane and around the porch—no older than seven years old, a job a full-grown man would have taken more than an hour to do. And I had no idea until Joseph came home from town and brought him back inside, nearly soaked to the bones and shivering.”

“I wanted to repay your kindness,” Rust says, looking somewhere across the kitchen. “Was the least I could do.”

“For a hot meal and a place to sit,”Aya scoffs, shaking her head. “By that point I should have been paying you wages.”

Marty’s own memories stir beneath the surface alongside the sweet smell of freshly cut grass, and he knows that was a habit Rust never quite managed to break. An eye for an eye and one hand washes the other. He only wishes, so deeply now that the thought practically haunts him, that he’d been decent enough of a man to be gracious at the time.

And then he tries to envision a little boy with wavy hair the color of autumn, swallowed up in hand-me-down clothes and boots with tar patches on the soles. Piercing eyes, big and bright, shining like blue fire in his drawn face. Always with a battered book of some sort in tow—and petulant, withdrawn, the kind of child he would have chucked pebbles and taunts at as a boy himself. That’s a certainty that sends a phantom twinge of guilt through Marty, and he places his flattened palms on the table as if to steady himself when he leans forward to speak.

“You know, I’ve never seen a single picture,” he says, looking between Rust and the older woman. “From when he was growing up.”

“My Pop didn’t have a camera,” Rust says. “Didn’t believe in keeping one. Even if he did, I imagine anything he might’ve kept would be long gone.”

Aya’s mouth draws into a thin line, and she sits motionless for a long moment before pushing away from the kitchen table. “I have something I should give to you,” she says, and then pulla herself to her feet, her leather-soled mukluks soft on the floor. Even in old age she is tall, and in her youth would have struck a strong shape of a woman. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

The shepherd dog looks up when she clicks her tongue, waiting on a command. “Come, Lika,” Aya says, and together they walk through the doorway leading further into the house.

Rust watches them disappear with a faintly strained look pulling around his eyes. He taps a finger on the table and then traces the rim of his long-empty mug. “My father’s been dead for at least fifteen years now,” he says. “As far as I ever knew, he didn’t leave me a thing.”

“Maybe it’s just a gift,” Marty murmurs, voice held low. “What makes you think it has anything to do with your old man?”

Their answer comes a few seconds later when Aya returns with a plain envelope in hand, one gnarled finger edging along the open flap. Lika holds steady position at her side and only sits when Aya lowers herself back into the kitchen chair.

“We found this on your father’s land,” she says, holding out the envelope for Rust to take. “Many years ago, perhaps before you even went there yourself in light of his passing. It was after we knew—.” She stops short, regathering herself. “Well, it was after he returned to the forest.”

Rust holds the envelope between his thumb and forefinger, staring at it hard. Marty can’t tell if it’s shaking because the hand holding it is, or if Rust’s simply holding on tight enough to make the paper tremble. “What is it?” he asks.

“A photo,” Aya says, though she doesn’t say of what. “Nearly burned—we found it in the fire grate among the ashes. I believe the other is a cutting from the Fairbanks newspaper, perhaps something you will recognize.”

The kitchen grows quiet save for the faint crackle of tinder in the stove’s belly. Rust doesn’t move to open the envelope, and Aya folds her hands before bringing them up to rest against her chin.

“Forgive me for not doing it sooner,” she says, quietly. “But the time is more right, now. Your father may have intended them for the fire but did not see the errand through. I should think they belong to you.”

Rust nods and tucks the unmarked envelope away, the parchment rustling while he slides it into his coat pocket. “Thank you,” he says. “For being kind to us all those years.”

Aya smiles, shaking her head with a certain sort of fondness. “It was not a hard thing to do, _ada_. You always underestimate what it is you deserve.”

The mudroom door squeaks open and Abram stomps back into the kitchen, pulling his gloves off and going over to wash up at the deep basin sink. “You two staying for supper?” he asks, glancing back over one shoulder. “I’ve got my eye on a roasting hen out there, just about past her prime now.”

“Naw, that’s plenty kind of you but we can’t stay too long,” Rust says, slowly easing back from the table to stand. “Had some things to see over in the Hollow, and then we’ve got to drive back up the mountain to get home before dark.”

Marty stands alongside him and gathers his coat, waiting until Abram has dried off to reach for another handshake. “Privileged to have met you and your hauling team,” he says. “It’s not too often you find a man who does the amount of work in a week as I’ve seen you do in one damn day.”

Abram grins and pumps Marty’s hand before holding a palm out toward the door. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he says. “Let me walk you out so Cricket can get her goodbye kiss without running you down.”

Marty says his goodbyes with Aya, almost surprised when she wraps her arms around him to pat his back. “Behave yourself, Martin,” she says. “I wish we had met before my eyes left me, but I know there is great warmth in you.”

She doesn’t see the faint pink spread across his cheeks to the tip of his nose, though she still smiles all the same. “I’ll have Rustin back out to you shortly.”

Abram and Marty follow each other back out into the yard, their voices muffled and fading as they stroll further from the cabin. Aya moves to stand by Rust where he faces out the kitchen window, her shoulder lightly brushing against his arm.

“You belong to each other,” she says. “As much as the heart belongs to the spirit.”

Rust makes a soft sound deep in his chest, eyes still cast out the window. “It seems that way, sometimes.”

Aya turns and reaches up to touch the side of his face, letting her palm rest there. Rust doesn’t flinch away when her thumb traces along the ridge of his cheekbone, only tips his forward when she leans in to press a chaste kiss to his forehead.

“Have you gone to visit the lights yet?” the old woman asks, watching Rust with her pale eyes. “I know you would listen to them, when you were a boy. They will show you the way of it.”

Rust reaches out to touch her hand one final time. “I’m taking Marty up there in a day or two,” he says. “I wanted to show him the stars.”  
  
  


* * *

  
  
The Hollow, as Rust calls it, is not much more than a postage stamp town nestled in the little crook between two mountains. There’s only one stop light from stem to stern, and as far as Marty can tell it doesn’t seem to glow any other color but green.

“Blink and you’ll likely miss something,” Rust says, slowly cruising down the main road through town. They pass a barber shop built into the same old brick building as the post office, and both shopfronts can’t be much wider than a few feet past a man’s arms spread wide. Most of the store signs have been painted and repainted over old lettering a half-dozen times over, like you could peel back the years and count down how many generations had kept quarters in a place since it was raised from the ground.

One modest protestant church with a blue metal roof, a tiny pharmacy called Watt & Sons, and then there’s the sheriff’s office doing business out of what looks like an old gas station with a pair of dusty cruisers parked out front. The busiest block on the drag by a long shot is the diner advertising a free slice of Nelly’s cherry pie with every dinner plate. They drive past and Marty can see a group of grizzled old men sitting out on the porch beneath a slanted awning, puffing on cigarettes and sipping coffee while one slaps his knee and barks out a laugh mid-story.

“This is where I went to school up to the eighth grade,” Rust says two blocks later, slowing to a stop in front of a squat building with colorful paper pumpkins and ghosts strung in some of the classroom windows. “Only four days a week, always took off for the winter. When Pop wasn’t around I’d have to walk ‘bout six miles to the road, hitch a ride into town with a truck.”

Marty makes a short study of the half-rusted playground equipment standing in the schoolyard, the monkey bars and swings chipping dark green paint. He wonders if it’s the same stuff that was there when Rust was but doesn’t bother to ask, thinking the picture of a little boy in his mind wouldn’t have ever felt the need to play on slides and merry-go-rounds. “Where’d you go to school after eighth grade?”

“Mostly stopped going after that,” Rust says, sniffing some. His wrist is hanging lazily over the steering wheel but his eyes are still caught on the paper ghosts in the windows. “I’d do all my reading and schoolwork at home, bring it back up for a teacher to look at once a week. If there was some big test I needed to take they’d have me do it while I was here.”  

“That’s quite the fucking arrangement,” Marty says with a snort. “Here when I was that age, it’s a miracle I even graduated at all going to school five days a week, busy as I was chasing tail and getting up to god knows what.”

“They fast-tracked me and I got my diploma right after I turned seventeen,” Rust says, glancing at his side mirror to pull back out on the road. “Mostly because I think they were fucking sick of me, but at least it got me on the road to something else.”

Past the school there’s not much more to see, just an auto and tire shop and a few sparse buildings that look like they’ve seen far better days. One has been burned out to the blackened hull and left standing as a skeleton, but Rust doesn’t comment on it as they follow the road toward the outer town limits.

“Where’re we headed now,” Marty says, looking ahead into a wall of conifer and mountainside coming up in the distance. “Your dad’s old place out this way?”

“Naw,” Rust says, reaching down to turn on the radio dial to something low. “That’d be in the opposite direction, further up the mountain from Aya and Abram. There’s a place out here on the lake I’ve been once or twice, restaurant and lodge type-deal. Thought we could get something to eat before we head back home.”

“You need a reservation for a place like that?”

Rust loosely points out the windshield at the ironclad sky, even darker than it was in the morning. “This time of year they’re just about ready to close up shop for the winter,” he says. “Don’t imagine there’ll be many folks there at all, seeing how peak season ended sometime in early September.”

“Huh,” Marty says, shifting in his seat to stretch out both legs under the dash. They’d topped off the diesel in the truck a few miles before getting into Fox, and Rust still has the paper receipt in hand. It’d quickly been twisted up into a thin tube and has been getting rolled up and down his thigh in a mindless sort of movement for the past ten minutes or longer. Marty watches him for a few moments and wonders how bad the urge is to put the paper in the corner of his mouth and light it.

“Been doing good with giving it up, you know,” Marty says, feeling a little too much like he did on those rare nights when he’d drop by ballet studio to pick up Audrey and Macie from dance class. As if he really knows what he’s talking about. “Know it’s gotta be harder than you make it out to be.”

“What?” Rust says, eyes cutting sideways over to Marty. He follows Marty’s sights to the receipt paper and then clears his throat, promptly dropping it into an empty cup holder. “Oh, shit. Gotta do something with my other hand when I’m driving.”

Marty weighs out his options, thinks they’re both in a good enough mood that he’ll take the risk. “You know I brought something to take the edge off, if you need it.”

“Jesus, Marty,” Rust says with a rasping kind of laugh. “Make me feel like somebody’s fucking opium wife. I haven’t touched a pack of Camels in six months.”

“Alright, I’m just letting you know,” Marty says, holding a hand up in surrender. “Got that look like you’re fixing to chew through a box of nails.”

Rust grunts at that, growing quiet for a moment. He reaches up to thumb around his mouth and then lets the hand drop down to check the inner pocket of his coat. “I ain’t looked at what’s inside this envelope yet,” he says. “Not sure if I really want to.”

“Oh hell, I’ve been chomping at the bit waiting on you to bring that up,” Marty says with a laugh. “How haven’t you looked yet? I’d have tore into that the minute I got my hands on it.”

“There’s no telling what it is, knowing Pop,” Rust says, gone quieter. He looks straight ahead out across the sloping road again while trees tower on both sides, hiding everything beyond their branches and bodies. “Sometimes I think he was still just as much a secret to me on the day I left as he was the day I met him. Fifteen years of walking around the edges of a fucking shadow.”

Marty bites around his lip, brow gathered into something thoughtful. “You want me to look at them first? See what it is.”

“No,” Rust says, gently shaking his head. “If Aya wanted me to have it, I imagine it’s something I ought to see.”

  
  
  


The lodge is built right up at the edge of a dark lake, overlooking an inlet set into the rocks. Somebody has arranged a motley collection of orange and white pumpkins on a hay bale near the open foyer with a sign pointing ahead through the double doors. Marty squints at it as they pull around through the gravel lot, trying to decipher the slanted chalk writing.

There are a handful of cars loosely clustered together here and there, most of them with Alaska plates and rental stickers in the window. A lone man in a white server’s apron stands at the far side of the building, smoking a cigarette while the lakeside breeze blows in from behind. He only briefly glances at Rust and Marty when they swing down out of the truck and walk past him toward the entrance.

“Bickel Reception in the Atrium,” Marty reads off the chalkboard sign as Rust pulls open one of the doors. “I bet somebody’s gettin’ hitched.”

“Probably not a big crowd,” Rust says, breathing in cedar-touched warmth as soon as they step inside the lobby. There’s a fire roaring in a massive stone hearth across the lounge and his eyes stray to it while a clerk glances up at them from behind the desk. A brass plaque on the wall points the way toward the in-house restaurant, and he guides Marty toward the hall before anybody can think enough to ask after them.

The walls are lined with frames and sconces between the windows, everything glowing with the faint wash of overcast evening. It’s quiet and only when they near the atrium entrance do they hear the murmur of a faintly muffled voice, soft and speaking to the candid faces of two people on the edge of wedlock. Rust pauses at the closed door but peers through the plated window, and there’s just enough of a gap in the sash to reveal a bride and groom standing beneath an arbor together while the minister reads verse from her book.

“You were right,” he whispers, letting Marty lean in for a closer look. The wedding party is small, no more than a dozen people gathered to watch the ceremony, though the atrium has been strung with garlands of flowers and silver stars that drop down from the beams in the ceiling, flickering as they turn and catch the evening light.

“Now ain’t that nice,” Marty murmurs, stepping away from the door. “Under the stars n’ all.”

“C’mon,” Rust says, touching two fingers to his elbow. “We’re gonna get caught lookin’.”

They move further down the hall and follow a small set of carpeted stairs up into an indoor terrace that leads into the lodge’s restaurant. There’s the faint din of kitchen noise hidden under piano music, and the dining room seems mostly empty save for a family or two seated near the fireplace situated in the heart of the floor plan. One of the adjacent rooms is empty but overlooks the lake through a broad bay window, and that’s exactly where the hostess leads them with two menus and a pair of wine glasses in her hand.

“Can I take your coats?” she asks, briefly looking them up and down with mild curiosity, but Rust only shakes his head and gently pulls the red scarf from around his neck.

“Obliged, ma’am,” he says. “We’ll hold on to them if you don’t mind.”

Once they’re left to their own devices Marty pulls his arms free and moves to fix the sleeves of his flannel shirt, tugging them at the wrists. “Sometimes I feel like I ought to be helping you out of your coat,” he says, letting out a little laugh when Rust quirks an eyebrow at him. “Just old habits, y’know.”

“Don’t waste all your fine chivalry on me, Marty,” Rust says as he takes a seat. “What if I was the one wanting to help you with your coat?”

“Shit,” Marty says with a quiet snort, waving Rust off. “Suppose we take care of each other good enough, all things said and done.”

Rust rests his elbows on the table, watching Marty with an ounce of something like wickedness in his eye. “Have you ever considered,” he says, “that since we started livin’ together, a lot of your old notions about men and women have changed?”

Marty cuts a look from the corner of his eye, mouth pulled into a stern line. “What do you mean?”

“Mean like, knocking boots with another guy full time means you ain’t got a woman around to do the cooking and the cleaning, or pick out shit to put on the walls like they’ve done ever since you could remember,” Rust says, straightforward. “We’ve had to reevaluate our roles in this partnership and decide how we were going to split the load. Run a household and a business, the whole nine.”

“Well, Rust,” Marty says after a few beats of silence, reaching up to scratch along his jaw. “In case you forgot, I had about ten years there where I had the opportunity to figure a lot of that shit out for myself.” He goes quiet for a moment, and then clears his throat before catching Rust’s eye. “And when things started up like they did, between the two of us, I think I realized pretty quick that I had to try and take care of you best I could because you weren’t too keen on doing it yourself.”

Rust blinks at that, lips parting even though he doesn’t quite know what he wants to say. His eyes turn on the candle lit between them, one tiny flame he could pinch out between a thumb and forefinger.

“Marty,” he says, and doesn’t get much further than that. Tells himself this isn’t the time or the place for the discussion he’s got in mind. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day. Maybe ten goddamn years from now, if they’re lucky.

“So I figure a lot of my old notions and _roles_ have changed,” Marty says purposefully, gracing Rust with a smile that looks more heartfelt for all its bashfulness. “And you might not be a woman, but at the end of the damn day you’re still my priority.”

“You’d better save that one and put it in a card,” Rust says after a moment, though the line of his throat works in place while he does. His eyes have moved out the window to watch the lake, sleepy-bright but full of something else. “I’m touched, Marty.”

“Touched in the head,” Marty teases, bumping Rust’s foot under the table. “And for the fuckin’ record, all obvious extremities aside, living with you ain’t all that different from living with a woman.”

Rust cuts his eyes back over at that, face masked over with indifference. “That something you’ve got a problem with?”

“No sir,” Marty says, grinning at him from across the table. “I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

  
  
  


Dinner is a hearty spread of steak and roasted potatoes, glazed carrots, a split dish of stuffed mushrooms and a hot basket of buttered rolls. Their server pours out two glasses of wine and says the Baked Alaska is complementary on the house for the season’s end, and Marty doesn’t know if he’s enjoyed a meal this much in years, much less seen Rust do anything resembling the same.

They watch the sun sink lower in the sky while they eat, dipping closer to the lake as an hour slips by with ease. It’ll likely be dark before they make it back up to Fisherman’s Roost but neither man feels the urge to pull themselves away from the table just yet. It’s only after the remnants of dessert are melting together in a runny mess on their plates, and the little candle has finally flickered down to its dying wick in the jar, that Marty pushes his water glass aside and nods toward Rust’s coat draped over the chair across from him.

“Why don’t you take a look in that envelope,” he says. “Before we get back on the road.”

“Feel like it’s eating on you more than it is me,” Rust says, even though he reaches over to pull the aforementioned envelope from its hidden place in an inner pocket. He lays it flat on the table, giving the plain paper a long and scrutinizing stare before swearing softly to himself. “God damn it, Pop.”

“What’s inside is the past,” Marty says. “It ain’t nothing meant to hurt you, or else I know such a good woman like Aya wouldn’t have bothered with giving it to you in the first place.”

Rust blows out a long sigh through his nose. “Suppose you’re right,” he says. “I don’t usually make a habit of being this fucking stupid.”

Marty watches as he peels back the envelope’s flap and carefully pulls out two things, both clearly touched by age and time. Right away he recognizes one as a folded newsprint clipping, which Rust sets aside in favor of whatever else he’s holding between his fingers. It’s blackened on one side, burnt enough that the edge of the photo turned to ash and crumbled away, but Marty can still read the name written out in a looping hand in one corner. _Colleen._

Rust’s eyes scan over what’s left of the photograph, up and down, studying and remembering. He flips it over to glance at the back, and then lets out a breath as he passes the picture over to Marty, having finished comparing his mental image with a two-dimensional one. “That’s my mother.”

“Well I’ll be damned,” Marty says, somewhat at a loss, though he takes the small photo and reaches into his breast pocket to pull out his glasses. He slips them on and then considers the woman’s remaining portrait: most of her chest and the left side of her face have been charred away, but he can see that her hair had been curled and pinned away from her face. There’s no color to the photograph and the specifics are hard to pick out, but he would recognize those heavy-lidded eyes anywhere, painted or not.

Colleen was probably half Rust’s age when the photo was taken, but she looks weary already, smiling faintly without a hint of teeth.  No pearls at her throat or jewels clipped on her ears, and the detective in Marty figures that she probably didn’t have much by way of money despite being pretty in an ordinary sort of way. Her nose is unlike Rust’s, more pert and sloped upward at the tip, but the eyes are unmistakable and they share the same bottom lip.

“You favor her,” Marty says, looking up at the man in front of him. He passes the photo back over, careful to keep it from getting wet on the table. “Course I’ve never seen your dad, but this is sure something.”

“She had hair the same color as mine used to be,” Rust says, running the edge of a thumbnail along his mouth. “I remember her fingers were usually painted red. Wore cheap powder for perfume because she couldn’t afford anything better. Don’t know if I remember too much more than that, least things that I didn’t imagine.”

Marty doesn’t know if he has any words, figures they’d all be empty anyhow if he did. He thinks of his own mother, permed and petite and sitting behind the wheel of his father’s big white Buick in her ironed day dress, fussing at him in the rearview about hanging too far out the window. How she’d folded his socks into bundled pairs until the day he moved out with Maggie and the lipstick smears he’d have to scrub off his face almost up until the day she died.

“She shouldn’t have left you,” he says, pushing his glasses up on his head with a deep frown. “No matter how hard the times might’ve been, being on her own with a baby.”

“Self-interest isn’t really a burden for the people who make a point out of seeking it,” Rust says, glancing down at the photo again. “I don’t imagine she had much guilt, seeing how I never saw her again.”

“I don’t know,” Marty says, reaching up to rub around his eyes. “Hope she did, doing something like that when you were as small as you were.”

Rust rolls a shoulder that passes for something like a shrug. “I’ll never know the difference,” he says, and then reaches for the folded piece of newsprint. “We never got the paper delivered, so I can’t imagine what the fuck this is.”

It turns out to be an article torn from the weekly section of April 1981, and right there in yellowed greyscale at the top is one Rustin Spencer Cohle, aged 18, standing between two other young men as he gets sworn into the United States Army.

Rust stares at it even after he hands it over to Marty, gone oddly still. “I’ve never seen that before,” he says. “Don’t even remember getting my picture taken.”

The boy in the picture is handsome, stern at the brow, still with a headful of wavy hair that would’ve been shorn off to the scalp shortly after the photo was taken. He’s thinner and wiry, tanned but a little blemished in the face, lacking a black bird on his right forearm. Even at 18 Rust still wears the same sort of expression Marty recalls seeing on the face of a man two and three lifetimes later. As if he’d seen into the desolation of his own future and kept marching toward it anyways.

“He didn’t want me going,” Rust says, almost distantly, drawing Marty’s eyes away from the paper clipping. “He told me I was as good as any coward, going off and joining up to fight another man’s battles. Said he’d only ever taught me to live and die on my own terms and I’d gone yellow-bellied and fucked fifteen years of everything he’d done for me in one fell swoop.”

Marty blinks, looking between the photo and the Rust across from him now. “From what I remember, you told me he did his own time serving back in Nam.”

“All the more reason to call it a failure in his eyes,” Rust says with a low breath, drumming his thumb on the edge of the table. He makes a vaguely troubled face for a moment, caught between two thoughts in his head. “Which is a big part of why I don’t see him holding on to that piece of paper.”

“Maybe he had a change of heart,” Marty says, carefully setting the clipping back on top of Colleen’s photo. Out the window darkness is starting to settle over the lake, slowly falling like a sheet tossed in the air. “Seems like you’ve got most of the proof you need right here.”

Rust puts both things back in their envelope, creasing the folded edge between his fingers. “Maybe,” he says, looking at the unmarked ivory paper like it might reveal something else if he stares long enough. “Maybe so.”

The restaurant is empty by the time they’ve paid and settled their bill. Bussers and waiters go about their nightly duties with practiced ease while the telltale sound of a wedding party can be heard as it unfolds somewhere else in the lodge. When Marty gets up and comes around the table to take Rust’s coat in hand, Rust only stands and holds an arm out, ducking into a secret smile while he lets himself be helped into it.  
  


* * *

“You got your walking stick?” Rust asks the next morning, coming around one side of the truck with his breath fogging on the air. Dawn has only barely touched Fisherman’s Roost but he’s already pulled into the invisible rhythm of the day ahead, efficient and alert, something Marty watches with sleep still clouding his eyes while he sips at a thermos of coffee.

“It’s right here,” he says, nudging the said stick where it rests next to his knee. They’re both settled on the top porch step, waiting, Marty’s eyes on Rust while he kicks and makes a quick inspection of the tread on all four truck tires. When he squats down to tighten the valve cap on one his shirt rides up at the waist, just enough to reveal the pistol where it’s been holstered at his hip.

Marty eyeballs the gleam of metal in the faint daylight, not thinking too much about whether or not they’ll need to use it. Considers it an insurance policy of sorts, all things told, even if he misses the familiar weight of his Colt on his side. If shit hit the fan he’d be walking into a gunfight with nothing but a mid-grade hunting knife and a bad knee, but having Rust on your side always tended to up the odds in favor of winning. And if not winning, at least getting off easy.

Rust finishes his walkthrough and crunches back up through the sparse gravel to stand at the foot of the stairs. He hitches both hands up on his hips and shifts his weight over onto one leg, and Marty wonders if he knows how he cocks his leg out to the side whenever he does it.

“Gonna be a lot of walking today,” Rust says, looking up at where Marty’s still seated on the steps. “I don’t think anybody’s kept up the road since Pop died, and it wasn’t much more than a line in the dirt to start with.”

Marty caps the lid back on his thermos and sets it down between his boots, gazing down at Rust in kind. “Be some good exercise, then,” he says. “I told you I’d let you know if something got to bothering me good enough.”

“I figured I’d remind you in the interest of making sure,” Rust says, trudging up onto the porch to retrieve his coat off the railing. It’s cold enough this morning that there’s a thin layer of white frost on the ground, though it likely won’t last long enough to see past noon. Still cold enough, though, that Rust’s wrapped the red scarf around his neck again and even tied it for good measure.

He shoulders their rucksack and then reaches down to help pull Marty up, who pretends to wave Rust off before taking his hand anyhow. “Might have to help me out of the saddle later, slick, but you don’t gotta help me in it just yet.”

Marty gets his walking stick in hand and steps lightly down the stairs, pulling on his gloves while he waits for Rust to lock up the cabin. Their eyes meet when he turns to thud back across the planking, the porch light still lit up behind his head in the early hour, and they aren’t so different from the eyes of a man Marty met a long while ago. Sometimes it’s easy to think of bygone times where they toed around a partnership founded on little more than basic civility, but all that had changed into something else, eventually. And then much to Marty’s surprise it’d kept right on changing, given the right nudge and a little room to grow.

Rust had always been Rust, he figures. At least in the deeper ways where people couldn’t see or touch, or in all the ways that made up the substance and stuff of a man’s soul. Like he’d grown from the inside out while the rest of the whole goddamn world got it all backwards, trying to build themselves from the outside in. And then by the time they’d realized their mistake, it was already too fucking late.

Marty’d been one of those people too, once upon a time. At least he’d started out that way, going through the motions of life until middle age and one wild twist of circumstance dropped the last thing he ever expected, but the one thing he might’ve deserved, right back into his lap for another round. He tends to think about weird shit like that nowadays. Knows there isn’t much of a secret as to how and why, especially when the voice in his head tends to sound a little less like himself and more like somebody else.

Marty laughs a little as he swings up into the truck, and Rust looks over at him from behind the wheel, sleepy eyes blinking in an unspoken question.

“If twenty years ago somebody would’ve told you about all this,” Marty says, gesturing around them, and then between himself and Rust, “would you have believed them?”

“Twenty years ago?” Rust says, cutting a scowl out the windshield that slowly turns into a poorly hidden smile. “Naw. You were too much of an asshole back then.”

Marty throws up a halfhearted middle finger but laughs while Rust turns the engine over. “Trust you to never sugarcoat shit for me,” he says, heaving out a long sigh. “Though I’d venture to say you weren’t such a sweet thing back in the day, either.”

“As fate would have it, then,” Rust says in a vaguely cryptic voice that coaxes a snort out of Marty, turning to start riding down the lane that’ll lead them to the mountain road. “Maybe we were destined from the start.”

  
  
  


Today’s journey brings them down one mountainside and up the next, going miles beyond the dirt turn-off that led to Aya and Abram’s homestead the day before. Rust keeps passing signs that point toward Fox Hollow until there’s none left to be seen, and then hangs a right out in what looks like, for better or worse, the middle of fucking nowhere.

A shallow culvert is set back into the woods and around a bend, unseen from the main road like a little hidey-hole. Dirt tire tracks lead around it and disappear further into the trees, but the path is so overgrown with foliage now that Rust doesn’t even try to push through it.

“Suspected as much,” he says, shifting the truck into park before cutting the engine. “There ain’t any driving up through there anymore. Best we could manage is horseback or on foot, so it looks like we’ll be making the hike.”

Outside the air is cold and quiet, almost hushed as if the forest is waiting to draw breath again. The hill they’re standing at the foot of is steep enough that the trees seem to be bent at the waist, stretching their roots to peer at the newcomers. Marty turns in a slow circle where he stands, looking up at all of it, feeling the wind and smelling the evergreen and hearing not much of anything at all. He can’t shake the sudden feeling that they’re being watched, though he wouldn’t say he feels threatened by it—just that they’ve stepped into something else’s circle of awareness.

“How far have we got to go?” Marty asks, looking over at the overrun trail before turning to find Rust.  

“The old place is about a mile back from this point,” Rust says, reaching into the bed of the truck to pull Marty’s walking stick out. He’s already got the rucksack on his shoulders, looking a bit bulky under the thickness of his coat but not any less agile. “But there’s some stuff further out beyond that, things I wanted you to see.”

The stick is passed into Marty’s hands and they both stand still, not doing much more than breathing. A little bird finally breaks silence and twitters somewhere above, likely a chickadee from the high pitch of its song. Marty looks over at Rust and works his jaw for a moment, watching the wind card its fingers through his hair.

“When was the last time you were here?” he asks.

“I drove up here once, year or so before I decided to come back down to Louisiana,” Rust says, not quite meeting Marty’s eye. “Place was already in bad shape, though I don’t think many folks had bothered to come around and fuck with it. Nature just reclaiming what was hers.”

“Your dad was gone by then,” Marty says, only partway a question. There’s an edge of hesitation in Rust’s voice. It might be a thread of regret or it might be something else.

“Mmm,” Rust answers, starting at a slow walk up the trail long since left to run wild. Marty falls into step at his side, one ear bent to keep listening. “We parted ways when I wasn’t much older n’ seventeen, after I enlisted. I never did see him again.”

Rust pulls a sapling back and has Marty walk ahead, gently letting the tree sway back into place before following. The road is narrow and crawls up through the trees, like a sidewinder curving around the mountain. Marty thinks back as far as he can, skirting around memories that might tease out a time when Rust spoke about his father.

“You never did go see him, that time you said he had leukemia,” Marty says. “Know that was just the alibi we had, but did he really—?”

“Naw,” Rust says, and then swears low under his breath. “Maybe. I’ll never know for sure what happened before he passed, but I know he wouldn’t have stuck around long enough to see the end of it.”

Marty frowns a bit, focusing on spearing autumn leaves across their path with the end of his walking stick. “You think he…well. You think he took matters into his own hands, then.”

“Seems like the most plausible thing,” Rust says, heaving out a cloud of breath. “He didn’t want to be beholden to any man—lived most of his fucking life on that philosophy, far as I can tell. So it’d make sense, I reckon, that he wasn’t even gonna wait around for death to come knocking in the end.”

“God damn,” Marty says, for lack of anything else. The chickadees are singing again, and their telltale calls almost sounds akin to a tiny voice saying _swee-tie, swee-tie_.

“I thought he was shithouse crazy for a long time after I left,” Rust says with a sigh, tipping his head back to look at the forest above them. “Still do, most of the time.”

Marty thinks of his own father, unwavering and firm-handed, a stoic cut of man even up until the very end. Maybe their dads weren’t all that different when snuff came to snuff. But whereas Rust was raised to be a soldier by a man who didn’t believe in fighting wars, Marty was passed between his mother’s lap and his father’s fists enough that he didn’t know what to believe in.

They’d loved him, though.

“How did you know?” Marty says, mentally stumbling for a moment while he tries to nail down his thought. “I mean you said, when we were at the hospital after Carcosa—you remember. You said you felt him there.”

_There._ Rust immediately knows what Marty’s talking about. That pool of black nothingness, inky and fluid and altogether intangible. But still somehow so warm and blissfully welcoming.

“How I knew he loved me?” Rust asks quietly, and then stops dead in his tracks.  

A twig snaps and Rust yanks Marty back before he can even blink, pulling him flush against his side as they rear back to the edge of the trail. Everything is deadly quiet for a long moment, and then Marty sucks in a lungful of cold air before rasping, “What in the name of _fuck?”_

“Tripwire,” Rust says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. He wordlessly coaxes Marty’s walking stick out of his hand and steps back over to where they’d been before, squatting down to look at a barely visible line stretched across the trail. He cranes his head around for a few moments, eyes whetted sharp, and then points off somewhere into the overgrowth. “There it is.”

“There what is?” Marty asks, squinting at nothing but forest. “Goddamn. If you’re pointing out some Raiders of the Lost Ark shit, I ain’t seeing it.”  

“That old log,” Rust says, drawing himself back up to full height. “The one leaning over there between the birch trees—it’s hooked up to the trip.”

Sure enough there’s a heavy log leaning at a perilous angle in the thicket, like it’d maybe fallen and found itself lucky enough to be caught between two other trees, but Marty looks closer and sees that a half-rotted rope had been wrapped and knotted near the top.

Rust takes a step back and snags the trip wire with Marty’s walking stick. There’s the instantaneous sound of something splintering and snapping nearby, and then they both watch as the log groans and falls to the ground with a shuddering thud right across the trail ahead.

“Guess we would’ve had to walk anyway,” Rust says, squinting at the tree trunk blocking the entire road. It’s big enough in circumference that two grown men probably couldn’t touch fingers if they circled their arms around it. “Pop must’ve wanted to keep vehicles from trespassing after he was gone.”

Marty steps up to the tree trunk and nudges it with the toe of his boot, the petrified wood fully unyielding. He lets out a hoot of bawdy laughter and shakes his head in something like disbelief. “You mean to tell me this has been waiting for our asses to come trudging up here for fifteen, twenty goddamn years?” he asks. “Just biding its sweet old time.”

“I’d call it a favorable omen,” Rust says, swinging a leg across the fallen log before reaching a hand out to help Marty over. “Means there ain’t been a soul up this road since he set the wire. I’d be glad to know the old place hasn’t been torn down or vandalized since I last saw it.”

“Your old man was a piece of fucking work,” Marty grunts, stepping up over the trunk with one hand on Rust’s shoulder for balance. “A real comedian, screwing with us from the afterlife.”

Rust smirks a little at that, hitching his rucksack up as they continue down the remaining trail. “He never did seem to have much by way of a sense of humor. Least not when I knew him.”

“It’s a wonder you turned out to be such a charmer,” Marty says, though the pinch of warmth in his tone comes through with ease.

“You ain’t kidding about that,” Rust says, and then guides them both around a patch of brambles choking through the undergrowth. The trail is starting to taper and the first bend is up ahead, leading on an incline further up the mountain. Beyond that and through the trees, the sky opens up and shows them a snapshot of sprawling conifer spread like a rolling quilt over the land. Something flutters deep in Rust’s stomach at the sight—not nerves or any real excitement, but like an old homing current waking up after an overlong winter nap.

He wonders if the only reason he’s got the feeling now is because this time, he brought the thing he calls home back with him.

  
  
  


The old homestead is still standing, albeit on what is likely its last limping and hobbled leg. Nearly twenty years without repair and that must be Travis Cohle’s last boldfaced testament to the elements and God and anybody else who ever got caught looking: what you build with your own two hands will always outlast yourself.

There’s no rusted-out mailbox or little wooden sign staked into the earth painted with _The Cohle’s_ , not that there ever was to begin with. No tattered chimes hanging on the eves, no empty flower boxes hanging by rusty nails off the window sills. Sun and rain and snow have eaten a hole in the east side of the gabled roof, and Rust suspects the wood rot inside might be bad enough that they’d fall through the floor in some places. He doesn’t even want to think about the privy house out back, which looks like a ramshackle skeleton left out to stand in the cold.

Marty, for all his usual laughter and chatter, doesn’t say much at first. They walk around the low stone wall that Rust and Travis built with their own hands the summer after Rust turned nine, and against the backdrop of a decaying cabin it has fared best against the turning wheel of time. The high summer grass has mostly died off and a hint of the footpath that leads to the porch is still there, just a groove worn into the dirt by thousands of footsteps that spanned two and three decades. Even if it wasn’t there, Rust knows he could still follow it blind in the dark.

“This is where you grew up,” Marty says when they’re standing at the foot of the small porch, a touch of something wistful in his voice. The heavy wooden bench and table are still there, covered in lichen and still scarred with grooves from Travis’s skinning knives and cleaver. Up in the eaves the twig and moss remnants of a bird’s nest are visible, long since abandoned with the departure of spring. There are no light fixtures, no humming electricity nearby. Just the distant song of birds and wind shifting through the treetops.

“For fifteen years,” Rust says, clearing his throat a bit. He feels a latent sense of urgency, like he ought to be making introductions even though there aren’t any left to be made. “It ain’t much.”

“Do you think there’s anything left inside?” Marty asks, taking an experimental step on the bottom stair. It creaks under his weight but holds strong, and Rust’s eyes go to the front door. It’s shut and latched and the twin windows facing out are unbroken. He figures there’s nothing left to be seen, and certainly nothing left of his father on the other side. Everything withered away but old ghosts and dust.

“We can look around,” he says. “Not sure of the integrity of the full structure anymore, so we gotta tread careful. But there’s not a lot left to see.”  

Marty takes another careful step, and then another, until he’s standing on the porch. He turns and waits for Rust, eyebrows high on his forehead. “Thought you said there probably hasn’t been nary a soul out here but Aya and Abram in twenty years.”

Rust draws in a steadying breath before looking off somewhere beyond the house. “When I came back up here the last time, I figured he’d made a point of clearing most of his shit out. Gave it away, mostly, so I heard in town from anybody who remembered.” He feels like he’s come to terms with this reality a long time ago, but it isn’t as easy as he would’ve thought, saying it out loud to Marty.

“He didn’t—well, he didn’t want to leave much behind, you know,” Rust finishes. “Always preached that a man should clean up his messes. That’s how I knew he was gone.”

“Jesus,” Marty says, features creasing up into something pensive. He turns and gazes at the front door, then back to Rust. “We don’t need to go in, if you don’t want to. It ain’t even really my place to ask.”

“Course you can ask,” Rust says, stepping up to join him on the porch planking. “Didn’t bring you up here for fucking nothing, and it ain’t like anybody’s around to take offense.”

The knob turns like a key in his hand but the door itself takes two good rams from Rust’s shoulder before it finally gives in the jamb. He pushes it open the rest of the way, letting the warped wood drag along the floorboards. Murky sunlight streams inside through the dirty windows, and then a larger, brighter beam coming from the misshapen hole in the roof.

Their boots crunch through debris on the floor while dust motes rise up to drift on the cold air. There’s nothing left inside but signs of animal nesting and the heavy cinder blocks where an iron stove used to sit. Across the room the hearth is dark and empty, a gaping maw of nothing. When he was growing up, Rust can’t remember a time when the fire there had ever gone out.

“All one room,” Marty says, tapping the floorboards with his walking stick before taking a few careful steps. He turns and blinks at Rust, a vaguely curious look around his eyes. “How’d you sleep?”

“On bedrolls by the fire in winter, mostly,” Rust says, tipping his head toward the cold fireplace. “In the summer when I got older, we’d set up by the windows on opposite sides of the room, let the night breeze in. Had a makeshift curtain by the washtub for cleaning up.”

Marty lets out a low whistle, shaking his head. He looks surprised, almost. Like up until now he hadn’t quite been able to believe it. “You weren’t kidding that time you told me you didn’t watch a TV ‘til you were seventeen.”

“That was Pop’s way,” Rust says. “Only the bare-bones necessities and not much more than that.”

“I would’ve lost my mind out here,” Marty says, bluntly. “Lost it in no time flat.”

Rust manages to crack a tight smile at that. “It’s different when you’re raised up into it,” he says. “I couldn’t afford to get bored. Always had to keep myself busy with something.”

They walk the remaining perimeter of the cabin’s single room, and there’s not much else to be found save for a ratty squirrel’s nest in the rafters and a blackened scorch mark on the floor near the fireplace.

“Did that when I was about six or seven,” Rust says, scuffing the mark with the toe of his boot. “Dropped a hot coal.”

Marty’s question is nearly instant. “How bad of a whipping did you get for that one?”

“I didn’t,” Rust says, still staring at the burn mark. “I scrubbed the privy and cabin floor from top to bottom, though. Until my fingers were raw.”

The air around them goes quiet again and Rust puts his foot over the scorch, hiding it from view. “C’mon,” he says, looking up at Marty from between his lashes. “Still more I want you to see.”

Marty follows as Rust leads them back out the door, gracing the cold room with the warmth of his laughter. “I wouldn’t miss a grand tour of your old outhouse shitter for the world.”

“Not quite what I had in mind,” Rust drawls, firmly closing the door behind them. He holds the cold knob in hand for a lasting moment before finally letting go. “We’ve got to take a walk out to the lake.”

They step over the low rock wall at the back of the cabin and leave the cabin behind, walking out into nothing but the dense sprawl of untouched forest. Rust had packed a compass and his old map as an assurance, but he knows he won’t need either any more than he’d need them to navigate from room to room in the house in Louisiana. He steps lightly, though he doesn’t rush with getting there, eyes and ears honed a little sharper than usual. Marty is always close at his side though, the two of them weaving in and out between trees and dormant salmonberry bushes as they cut through the woodland.

When the ground turns from the softness of plant decay and dirt to the crunch of cold rock, Rust looks ahead and sees the trees part in their familiar divide, giving way to the dark surface of lakewater reflecting the overcast sky. A sliver of a creek feeds into it at the opposite side but the water here on their end is smooth, almost glassy in its stillness.

“Look at all this,” Marty says, soaking in the view from where they’d come to stop a few yards from the shore. “I’d say I wanted a picture but I don’t think a camera would do it proper justice.”

“Used to spend a lot of time out here—fishing, swimming, reading,” Rust says, squinting across the lake. He slips the rucksack off his shoulders and opens it up, pulling out their coffee thermos and a bottle of water before passing the latter over to Marty. It’s a far cry past noon now, and he’s eager to lighten some of the load in the pack. “Be a good place to sit and have lunch.”

“Pick us a spot, then,” Marty says, and they walk further down the shore until they find a grassier patch in the sun. There’s nothing to sit on but they don’t mind, settling down on the ground with their backs to the trunk of a fallen tree. Two sandwiches appear and get divided, a half of turkey and a half of ham for each.

They eat in relative quiet, passing the thermos back and forth to sip at warm coffee. Eating lunch in silence is an old holdover from their days spent breaking bread over the hood of a shitty Honda or at the greasy picnic table of some roadside joint, but it still suits them fine. At least these days the strain of a case doesn’t hang between them like a bristling haunt, keeping hackles raised and both sides ready to bite.

Marty’s busy brushing crumbs off his knees and taking his last bite of turkey sandwich when Rust goes stiller than before, looking somewhere in the distance beyond the other man’s shoulder.

“Don’t startle or nothing, but turn around real slow and look,” Rust says, tipping his head toward the water. “Standing at the edge of the forest, bout twenty yards. Must’ve been watching us for a little while now.”

Marty’s stomach does a little twist in gut but he turns without hurry like Rust said, already halfway praying to anybody listening that he won’t come eye-to-eye with a grizzly or a bull moose. But what he finds is a whole lot different, bobtailed and sitting elegant vigil with its black-tipped ears pointed in their direction.

“You got bobcats out here?” he asks, still watching the big cat. “We don’t even hardly see them down in Louisiana unless they’re roadkill.”

“Lynx,” Rust says, quietly correcting him. “I’ve only ever seen one two other times in all my years up here.”

The lynx watches them for another few moments where it sits on its lightly dappled haunches, and then slowly stands to pad down to the edge of the lake. It crouches low to take a drink, eyes and ears still alert, and then gives both men one last stare before turning to slink back into the trees just as silently as it arrived.

“You think that’s a kitty Lilah would wanna pet?” Marty says, laughing a little to himself. He’s given up on the last bite of his sandwich and sets it aside, reaching to take another swig of water. “Y’know, this still doesn’t even seem real.”

Rust looks back out across the lake. He’d spent countless hours here in the spare moments of his youth, sketching and reading and throwing stones out across the dark water of the lake and his mind alike. If he closed his eyes anywhere else in the world he could envision this place—the smell of clean water, heady spruce and birch and pine needles, the cold rocks under his hands and feet. A serenity and quietness so real that you could almost step into it through memory alone.

It’s why he’d come here alone, the last time. He twists the band around the third finger on his left hand and knows it’s the same reason he needed to bring Marty this time around.

“It’s not such a bad sight,” Rust says. The line of his throat works for a moment, skin prickling with something that isn’t cold under his coat. He doesn’t know if he can talk but he knows he needs to. “I thought it would be a fitting place, once—something to see one last time.”

Marty turns to look at him, blinking like he’d been shaken out of a daydream. “What was that?”

“I know my Pop came here,” Rust says, wetting his bottom lip before he keeps on. “When he decided he had to end things. I figure I always knew it’d be out here somewhere, peaceful-like. Where he wasn’t under anybody else’s time or obligation.”

Marty leans back where he sits to process that. His head is slightly cocked to one side, like an old dog trying to pick up something it’d heard in the distance. “I don’t know what you’re saying, Rust,” he says, and Rust thinks he means it. “Your—your dad? You said he killed himself.”

“He always said he’d get his gun and his knife and take the long walk out into the woods,” Rust says, faintly rasping around the words. “Ever since I was old enough to know what the fuck he was talking about. And I never really gave it too much thought, you know, because he’d get too far down the bottle and just talk. It didn’t mean anything real.”

“Shit, man,” Marty says, shaking his head. The line of his mouth pinches up for a moment while he contemplates the reality of all that. “That’s rough. It’s just—it’s a fucking shame, you know.”

Rust isn’t thinking about Travis anymore, though. He’s balancing on the brink of somebody else’s story, and while they might’ve crisscrossed once upon a time he knows they won’t ever end the same.

“But there came a time later—a time when I thought about what he’d always said,” Rust says. “And I knew it wouldn’t be such a bad way to go out. Out in nature, where you could see a little bit of beauty in the fucking world. Where you wouldn’t have to worry about nothing anymore.”

“Rust,” is all Marty says. He’s gone pale, jaw set into a hard line. His eyes aren’t even really looking at Rust now, almost like he can’t stand to bear it. “What are you saying?”

Rust lets out a shaky breath into the cold air, trying to ignore the aching tightness in his chest. “I’m telling you I came up here, Marty, couple months before I realized I needed to go back down to Louisiana,” he says. “I’d sold most everything off but there were some boxes in storage, all the things I’d kept and gathered on the Lange case up ‘til ‘09—wrapped them up, left your work address on them. I figured at least that much would get into good hands.”

Marty’s looking at him now, hurt starting to pull tight around his eyes. Like he already knows the answers but he’s still got to find it in himself to ask. “Why’d you do it?”

“I got here and I was trying to find a good reason not to,” Rust says, feeling the resolve in his voice begin to come apart. “But by that time I didn’t have anything left, Marty. My daughter had been dead for twenty years and I—I wasn’t ever gonna see her grown. My Pop was gone, and I’d spent eight years between fishing boats and bars after I left Louisiana, trying to drink myself to fucking death. But it wasn’t working fast enough.”

“It would’ve been easy, then,” Rust says, wiping a hand across his eyes. “I thought I’d finally worked up the fuckin’ nerve to go through with it. I had my gun, but there was thin ice on the lake at the time. All I really had to do was walk out—and not fight it anymore.”

“Why’d you stop?” Marty asks, voice like broken glass in his throat. He reaches out and puts his hands on Rust, on his leg and then his arm, like he’s got to keep him from going too far back into memory. “What made you change your mind?”

Rust tries to laugh, but it comes out more like a sob. “Because I still had a fucking job left to do,” he says. “I still had work that needed to get done.”

“Dora Lange,” Marty says, quiet. Her name sounds like something reverent in the frigid Alaskan air.

“Dora,” Rust sighs, nodding weakly. He can hear the tree and its decorated branches whispering in his head as clear as day. “It all leads back to Dora.”

Marty’s grip on him gets tighter and he moves until he’s pressed into Rust’s side, hands tangled up in his scarf and coat. His eyes are still dry but he sounds scared when he talks, drawn into the horror of what might’ve been. “I wish I could go back and—and show you,” he says. “How it didn’t have to be like that forever. If I’d have known, Rust, if either of us had—had any fucking clue, about how things could be.”

“You didn’t know, Marty,” Rust says. He tells himself he ought not to cry, but there’s nobody here to see him but the one person who wouldn’t fault him for it. “I didn’t, either. We couldn’t have fucking known back then.”

“I should’ve been better,” Marty says, sniffing hard. “If I wasn’t such a spectacular fuckup of a human being, if shit hadn’t—if it hadn’t have gone south with Maggie, it wouldn’t have—you would’ve never come back up here.”

Rust finds his hand and holds onto it, trying to still those thoughts before they go too far. “What’s done is done,” he says. “It happened the way it had to happen. There’s no reason to go and hold it against yourself now.”

They grow quiet for a time, still felled against one another and letting the past fetter off in the cold wind. The sky looks like a great pane of grey slate overhead and the forest has grown quieter. A dampness lingers in the air, just enough to burn when they draw in a breath too fast.

“I have to tell you something,” Rust says after a while. Marty shifts at his side but doesn’t move away, head inclined to listen. “When we were in Carcosa. When I took—when I pulled the knife out.”

Rust feels a spike of something like fear touch his nerves when he hears himself say it out loud. In all this time they’d never talked about it, never brought it up beyond the margins of what felt like a distant nightmare.

“Don’t,” Marty says, a little bit broken. He shakes his head, looking up at Rust and then away again. “You don’t have to say it. You don’t have to tell me.”

“I thought it’d be easy,” Rust says, feeling wetness on his face now. “And I didn’t know, Marty—I didn’t realize what the future was gonna be. I just knew I was tired and that room was as far as I was gonna get. I’d done all I could fucking do.”

His voice breaks in half, then, when his next thought comes to mind. “I thought you’d get along alright without me.”

Marty’s face crumples at that and Rust can’t see clearly anymore but he holds on tighter, pressing his face somewhere against the other man’s neck. “I wasn’t thinking about leaving you behind,” he says. “I thought I’d found the way out.”

“Do you know how many nightmares I’ve had,” Marty chokes out, shaking under Rust’s hands. “How many times I woke up thinking I’d really lost you. That I was—fuck. _Fuck._ ”

He doesn’t say the word but Rust knows what he means. Because if love was the one thing that brought them this far, it was loneliness that tipped the first scale in bringing them back together.

Rust shushes him a little despite his own tears, pressing his nose somewhere behind Marty’s ear. “I made it back, though,” he says. “We made it back.”

“I thank God every fucking day, and that probably still isn’t enough to cover it,” Marty says. He reaches up to scrub a hand across his eyes, blearily looking at Rust’s tear-stained face, and then croaks out a ragged laugh. “If we ain’t a sore sight to see right now.”

“It don’t matter none,” Rust says, reaching up to touch Marty’s face without any hesitation, not an ounce of shame left to be had. He wipes a thumb under his eye and revels a little in the sensation of his whiskers against his palm, coarse but still somehow soft. “No good reason in holding shit back anymore, far as I can tell. Least of all from each other.”

Marty sniffs and chuckles again but tips his face into Rust’s hand for a moment. “You’re right about that,” he says, letting out a soft sigh.

Rust lets his hand fall away as he looks back out across the lake, features composed back into something more thoughtful. “The truth of it is,” he says, “in all the years I’ve been on this earth, outside my Pop there ain’t anybody else I’ve had longer than you, Marty. Not my mother, not my wife. Not even my little girl.”

Marty keeps quiet for a long moment, watching Rust’s face. “Ain’t that something,” he whispers, following Rust’s eyes to look at the glassy water.

“Means you’re something I’ve got to hold onto, now,” Rust says. “Reckon you’ve given me a lot more than I ever bargained for, this late in life.”

“And I reckon that shit swings both ways,” Marty says, letting out a long breath. He bites against his lip, turning something over in his mind before dropping it somewhere against Rust’s shoulder. “Thing is, I never gave much thought to deserving anything after—after Maggie and the girls, you know. Like you want it, yeah, but there was a time where I got to a point…I don’t know.”

“You can tell me, Marty,” Rust says gently, waiting for him to keep on.

Marty makes a pained sort of face, mouth screwed up into a thin line. “I thought I’d fucked it up too bad to get another shot, I guess,” he says. “Somewhere in ten years, all that casual dating shit leading to dead ends—you just reconcile it with yourself, that this is how shit’s gonna be. You’re gonna be alone.”

Rust knows that he’s never felt burdened with the same sort of fear—has been alone for most of his life, in one form or another. But Marty’s drawing in another breath before he can say anything, shaking his head in something like smalltime wonder.

“So imagine my surprise when somebody or something out there, I don’t know what the hell, but it just kinda…handed you to me, Rust. That it’d let me keep you, despite everything. Despite how close we came to something else.” He laughs a little breathless, bowing his head. “I don’t know how I got so damn lucky.”

Rust looks back out across the still lake, breath pillowing against the cold air. “What is a wise man if not the sum total of his sins?”

Marty turns to look at him, slow at first in the wake of dawning confusion. It takes him a moment to find his voice through the cold. “Maybe the things he might do in reparation,” he says, and then shakes his head, trying to shrug off the feeling that this is a conversation they might’ve bridged twenty years before. “Even if—well, even if you can’t fix everything in the end. Sometimes all an honest man can do is try.”

The tiny smile hanging Rust’s mouth grows a little bit wider. “There you have it,” he says. “We live and fucking learn, Marty. Maybe you earned your own luck.”

“Well I’ll be damned,” Marty says, sputtering a little despite his laughter. “And here I went and won the jackpot with you.”

“That’s putting a little too much shine on it,” Rust murmurs, lowering his lashes. “I ain’t exactly a silver dollar catch.”

“I dunno,” Marty says with a grunt, watching Rust climb to his feet before taking the hand held out to help him up, too. “I don’t think I’d be in a hurry to throw you back anytime soon.”

They brush themselves off and start packing up, Marty retrieving his walking stick while Rust shoulders the rucksack. It’s getting late enough in the day that they’ll be chasing daylight all the way home, but Rust walks back down along the edge of the lake one more time, and then heads up the bank toward the tree line before beckoning Marty over.

“C’mere real quick,” he calls, walking up on a lone white birch. It’s standing out like a sore thumb among the other trees, nowhere near as tall and broad as the surrounding spruce and pines. All its autumn leaves have fallen but for a handful, and rust crunches through them while he reaches up to touch something on the pale trunk.

Marty can’t see what it is until he gets up close, and even then it’s hard to make out the initials carved into the tree. But there they are, crude but unmistakable—right there in the bark somebody had taken a knife and whittled _RC_.

“I forget when I did that, exactly,” Rust says, mouth twitching a little wryly as he brushes his fingers over the letters. “Young enough that I had a pocketknife and thought it’d be a good idea to stake out my claim on something, I guess.”

“You know,” Marty starts to say, brushing a finger and thumb down the whiskers on his upper lip, “most folks usually put a crooked heart around it and…oh.” His words trail and taper off, eyes swiveled back to the open air above the lake. He thinks it might be raining at first, but it’s coming down too slow to be water. It isn’t until Rust turns and looks, too, that he realizes it’s started to snow.

“I was waiting for it,” Rust says, peering up at the steely sky. “Good thing they’ve already got snow tires on the truck.”

The flurry of it is soft but getting faster, but Rust’s expression looks mostly unconcerned. “I thought you said it wasn’t likely to start this early in the year?” Marty says, reaching out to catch the first few flakes on his hand.

“Naw, it’ll get cold enough to snow,” Rust says. “I just said it wouldn’t likely get bad enough to snow us up in the cabin, yet.”

He turns and leaves Marty by the tree, walking closer to the edge of the water. Rust looks along the shore for a few moments and then stoops to pick up a smooth stone, turning it over in his hand before slipping it into a pocket. “We’d better get along, then,” he says. “Still gotta get back to the truck and up to the Roost again before too long.”

“Alright,” Marty says, though he reaches down to fish his knife out of the pocket it’d been hiding in. “Just give me a second.”

They leave the lake behind and start the walk back toward Travis’s old cabin, breath puffing on the air while the ground and fir trees slowly start to grow whiter. Rust pauses for a few moments to let Marty catch up from where he’d fallen a few steps behind, standing still while snowflakes gather in his silvering hair.

Even when they’re long gone the white birch at the edge of the lake still stands proud, keeping its secrets both old and new. Right next to the old tattoo scarred into its trunk is something new, fondly etched out with the blade of a gifted pocketknife. If anybody ever happened to pass by and look, they’d see that _RC_ isn’t alone anymore. _MH_ has been added on too, for good measure.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


Fisherman’s Roost has undergone a transformation by the time they set foot on the ground, just a hair or two shy of nightfall. Rust had driven slow up the mountain road, minding all his corners and narrow edges, but it hadn’t taken too long to get back home without traffic to worry them. It’s quiet here near the cabin now, all the forest’s haunts and creatures gone to turn themselves in for an early night. Only the river’s voice can be heard now, muffled as it seems while snow continues to fall around them.

Rust doesn’t move to go inside right away, instead standing at the foot of the porch to face westward. Marty leaves his walking stick against the porch railing and turns to join him, wincing a little on the stairs but making no move to complain.

The sun is taking its last breath across the snowcapped mountains, its golden face making the sparse snow already gathered on the ground look like rose-dusted powdered sugar. Pale pink spreads over the treetops and kisses the peaks in the distance, swirling into a synaptic smear of misfired light and color that would look like bleeding neon if Rust bothered to look, but at the moment he only has eyes for Marty. The other man’s eyes are turned toward the darkening horizon, familiar blue tinted violet here on the edge of dusk. The cast of Alaskan twilight looks at home on his face, so much like the flushed ruddiness that burns there when he’s gone bashful or pliant and breathless, and Rust feels the gift of this moment soften every tired seam and cold joint in his body.

Like it’d been worth it, he thinks. Everything that ever caught fire and burned between them was all for this.

“Sure beats the hell out of anything I’ve seen in Louisiana,” Marty says, slowly turning to peer at Rust from the corner of his eye. He blinks when he finds that Rust was already looking at him, wrinkling up his nose into a goofy sort of smile. “What’re you over there lookin’ at?”

“Nothin’,” Rust says, though they both know it’s a fib he didn’t need to bother telling. “How’s that knee faring?”

Marty bends his leg a little, testing his weight, and makes a mild face. “Not too bad,” he says. “Sore enough that I probably ought to soak it for a little bit.”

“You can go ahead and fill the tub up if you want,” Rust says, reaching up to unwind the red scarf still looped around his neck. “I’ll bring some wood in and get the fire going again.”

“Feel like it’s too pretty out here to go in,” Marty murmurs, catching the last sliver of sun disappear behind the horizon. Behind them snow is starting to gather and pile up on the porch and eaves of the cabin. “Some real Christmas card shit.”

Rust makes a warm sound in his throat as he turns to walk back around toward the wood pile. “Aren’t you cold?” he says, just loud enough for Marty to catch.

Marty opens his mouth up to answer when a howl rings out in the distance, echoing through the trees in a long and lonely cry. A few seconds pass and then it’s joined by another and then another, all three harmonizing until they abruptly go quiet again.

“Welp,” Marty says, mostly to himself as he takes two short steps up onto the porch after a chill runs down his back. “That’ll be our cue to go in. Where’s the key?”

Rust shows back up a few moments later with an armful of kindling, the braided cord looped around his finger with the cabin key hanging from one end. His eyes gleam a little as he unlocks the door, stepping aside to let Marty in first. “You don’t like the evening entertainment?”

“Can’t say I do,” Marty quips back, waiting for Rust to follow him before he shuts and latches the door. “Think the radio over here’ll suit me just fine.”

Rust kneels to start stacking firewood in the grate and they go through a well-worn routine of shuffling around each other with the ease of familiarity, only different now in the presence of new surroundings. Coats hung up, boots off, Marty’s knit cap on the dresser next to where Rust unwound the red scarf and set it aside with the holstered gun. No coffee this time of night, but they sip around two frothy bottles of Alaskan Summer while their dinner starts warming up on the stove.

It occurs to Marty that he hasn’t touched a television or a computer in nigh on five days, outside checking the weather and peering at the odd email on his cell phone. Most of the time service hadn’t even come through up in the mountains, but hell if he even found enough of a spare moment to care or notice.

When supper’s mostly been eaten and the old radio has lost its voice in the middle of an old Buddy Holly song, Rust gets up to start clearing dishes and rinsing them off at the sink. He’s tired, and the day has been long for them both, but there’s no yoke of addled tension hanging in the air. The cabin is quickly warming up and his bones feel longer and looser now that they’re out of the biting cold, though his thighs and calves ache some in light of a day spent climbing uphill.

Marty pardons himself from the kitchen and moves across the room to disappear behind the folding screen. Water starts running shortly, and when Rust hears the plug chain rattle against the old ceramic he knows Marty’s decided to settle in for a bath. It isn’t really any luxury he often affords himself back home, at least not since his cast came off and everything had healed into shiny pink scars. Either he’d managed to do a real number on his knees or he’s got a penchant for relaxing in mind.

When Rust smells something floral and clean spark in the air, he follows his nose over to the tub, stepping from behind the screen to watch Marty wash over his neck and shoulders from where he’s sitting in the filling tub.

“I thought you didn’t like lavender,” Rust says, shifting his weight over onto one hip while he crosses his arms. Marty glances up at him but doesn’t stop his washing, the two of them long since familiar enough with the shape and image of each other now that there’s no need to hide anything from view now.

“Ain’t all that bad,” Marty murmurs, soaping up his cloth again to start washing down his arms, gently sloshing hot water around. “It’s got all those soothing properties and shit. Figured it’d be good after our big trek through nature.”

Rust offers a vague nod, mostly caught up in the mild spell of running water and steam in the air. He straightens and turns away, all sleepy eyes and soft lines, briefly disappearing somewhere across the room. The warbling radio turns down until it’s quiet, and when he comes back he’s already working at the buttons on his flannel.

“Are you finished washing up?” he asks, shrugging out of his shirt and letting it drop to the floor. Marty shifts around in the water and watches Rust unbuckle his belt before reaching up to pull his undershirt off.

“Uh, just about I guess,” Marty says, idly pulling his cloth through the water. “Did you need me to hurry up and get out?”

“No,” Rust says, stepping out of his pants and shorts until he’s not wearing a stitch of anything else. He cuts a look from beneath his lashes at Marty before stepping up to test the water running from the faucet. “You can stay right where you are.”

Marty blinks and laughs a little bit, watching Rust walk around to the opposite end of the tub with all his usual languid posture. The bath is deeper than the one they have at home but not much longer. “Not that I’m complaining or nothing, but I think you’re being a little optimistic about the two of us fittin’ in here at one time.”

“We’ll be alright,” Rust says, and then steps one foot into the space between Marty’s ankles, hissing a little against the heat before drawing his other leg in. He settles himself down at the other end of the tub, easing one of his legs in the space next to Marty’s. It’s a snug fit but they manage somehow, and when Rust finally sinks down against the ceramic he lets out a long and contented sort of sigh.

Marty keeps soaking his knee without complaint, though he reaches for the bar of soap and tosses it down to land in Rust’s lap with a splash. “Get some of that rind off you,” he teases, jumping a little when Rust presses a foot into his inner thigh. “D-don’t you start that,” he stammers, trying not to squirm while he keeps Rust’s foot from inching up any further.

“I ain’t,” Rust says, wetting the soap before he starts washing over his chest and then up around his neck. The tub is full enough around them to keep the view modest, but Marty still watches as he keeps washing further down his body, hands dipping somewhere beneath the water.

It’s not a hard thing, knowing that they’re both getting older, with the truth of that manifesting in ways that show up more in the mirror than the mind these days. But maybe it doesn’t bother Marty as much as it used to years ago. He knows he doesn’t cut as strong and sharp a figure as he once did, and he eventually gave up on his hair and buzzed it down without putting up a fight. Even Rust doesn’t look as lithe and tight as he once did, though his hips are still narrow and his profile is as handsome as it always was, crow’s feet around his eyes aside. There’s a comfort in knowing that they’re both well-acquainted with the small imperfections of one another, whether those things are potholes you steer around on familiar road or grooves lovingly worn into the warmth of old wood. Scars and all, Marty thinks. The real comfort is in knowing they’ve somehow stuck around long enough to collect them.

At the opposite end of the bath, Rust finishes with his washing and sets the soap aside, eyes on Marty like blue ocean glass. He shifts around in the water, slowly maneuvering his way up toward the other man so settle down between his knees. Marty draws his legs up to give him some room but Rust slips a little once he gets there, sloshing water up over the lip of the tub.

“There goes our deposit,” Marty says, though he holds Rust where he is, wedged up between his thighs with their legs tangled up under the water.

“S’alright, we don’t got one,” Rust says, and then dips his head to press a crooked kiss somewhere against Marty’s damp shoulder. He goes still then, lounging there with one hand braced against Marty’s chest. Half his ass is out of the water but he doesn’t seem to mind, caught up in thoughts of something else.

“Sometimes I feel like I can hear you thinking from across the room,” Rust says, simply. “Gets louder when I get up on you like this.”

Marty hums a little at that, reaching down to cup a handful of water up over Rust’s side. They could use some more hot from the tap, but damned if he wants to move and fix it just yet. “You must hear my old hamster doing laps up there a lot.”

“Don’t worry about gettin’ older,” Rust says. He lets out a small breath that feels cooler where it tickles across Marty’s skin. “I’m not worried about it none.”

A little thrill shoots through Marty at having been found out, but it doesn’t last, because of course Rust knows how to read him; he always has. “Have you _ever_ been worried about a thing like that?” he asks, letting his hand rest around the curve of Rust’s rib cage, right next to the indigo bird there.

“Not really,” Rust says, quiet. “Can’t say I ever thought I’d have to be.”

Some of that fear from earlier in the day seeps back into Marty’s chest, like it’s a hurt he’s got to hold there when he thinks back on what he’s learned. And he doesn’t really know what to say—never has been as good with fancy words as Rust, and this feels like it’s something bigger than he is. Like it goes beyond him or maybe even the two of them together, further out, and he’s just lucky enough to still be tethered to Rust in the meantime. He remembers thinking that holding on to Rust in the beginning was kin to the impossibility of catching lightning in a glass bottle, and yet he’s sitting here now with a man who always felt like a wild force of nature draped across his lap, softly pliant and vulnerable.

So maybe it wasn’t ever about catching lightning, Marty thinks. Something smaller and simpler than that, since the answers to life’s questions had always tended to be right up under his nose when he least expected. Maybe all he really had to do this whole time was hold open a patient hand and wait for fireflies.

Rust had come to him willingly, after all, after everything. Folded himself right into back into Marty’s life and then his hands and heart, if only because there was finally an open spot waiting for him there.

“Well, I hope you’re looking forward to me hiding vitamins in your applesauce one day,” Marty says, bumping his nose into Rust’s hair. “When you’re white-headed and even more ornery than you are now.”

“Sounds about right,” Rust says, smiling just a little. He doesn’t tell Marty that hearing him talk about the future is what makes it seem real, but they’ll save that for another day, maybe. Now that they’ve got the time left to get there.

“C’mon,” Rust says, slowly easing himself up to stand from the tub. He reaches for a pair of towels and then for Marty, holding out a hand to keep him balanced while he gets his feet up underneath him. Marty steps out and pulls the drain, and when they’re both finished toweling dry Rust only turns off the overhead lights and pads across the cold floor toward the bed.

Marty watches him for a long moment and then silently leaves his towel hanging over the edge of the tub. Doesn’t bother with fishing any nightclothes out of his suitcase, only follows in Rust’s footsteps until they’re both standing at the side of the bed. They watch each other, eyes faintly shining in the dark, bodies silhouetted by nothing more than the orange cast of light coming from the hearth.

It’s a wordless sort of conversation, when Rust slides into bed and Marty follows. The frame faintly creaks under them but holds strong, welcoming their weight in a nest of soft linen.

“Lay down,” Rust says, gently. He waits until Marty does just that, lying back against the pillows with his eyes full of nothing but Rust, and then watches as the younger man moves to straddle across his hips.

Rust looks down at Marty, his eyes incandescent under heavy lids in the half-dark. He could wage an honest guess about the thoughts running through the other man’s head but decides to ask anyway. “What are you thinking?”

“Right now I’m thinking you’re gonna get cold up there all by yourself,” Marty says, thumbs tracing over the soft jut of Rust’s hipbones. “Thinkin’ you should come down here so I can warm you up.”

Rust hums in his chest, letting Marty’s hands move up his hips, slow and skimming as they follow a map from one thing to the next. Fingertips stray from the edge of outstretched flight feathers painted in bruised shades of blue-violet to three white points burned into Rust’s ribs, traveling lightly across his skin on a short journey to the top of a more familiar scar. Rust only breathes softly while Marty does it, eyes cast low to the man looking up at him.

It’s such an ugly thing but also intimately striking, warped and crude but not so much unlike a stroke of white gold seaming broken china back together. “Jesus,” Marty sighs after a moment, following the pale puckered line all the way down to the softer part of Rust’s stomach below his navel. His voice sounds strained, stuck in the back of his throat again. “We came up here for a damn vacation, and all I can think about is how many times along the line I could’ve lost you for good.”

One of Rust’s hands touches the back of Marty’s, resting there while he decides to indulge a spider-fine thread of his own curiosity. “How many?” he asks.

“Too many,” Marty answers, quicker than either one of them would’ve thought. “But I reckon once is enough.”

Rust stays silent, though he bows over Marty until he can press a kiss against his mouth, warm and light. Two hands come up to hold him there and so he stays, scooting down Marty’s body and into the space next to him so they can come together again.

It’s easy to lose any sense of time in these quiet moments, wrapped up in the relief of touching and being touched without any pretense. All of it a sort of joint rhythm spun out into a soft and tender exploration of skin, like they’ve never done this before despite knowing every inch of each other like the back of one shared hand. The old comfort of rediscovering something you love for the thousandth time, or coming home again after a long time away.

Rust unfurls like moonflower and burns hot under Marty’s hands—always has, ever since the first time he let himself be undone and put back together again. He kisses hungrily, almost desperately, like he wants to climb inside the safest parts of Marty and lose himself there.

“So you don’t ever think we’re gettin’ too old for all this?” Marty says when Rust finally lets him come up for air, a little rumble of laughter between them.

“Naw,” Rust says, nosing along Marty’s jaw to leave another kiss there, taking some small ounce of delight in the scratch of whiskers along his face. “You’d better go ahead and do me while you can, though.”

“I intend to,” Marty says, and then rolls over so he’s on top of Rust, coming back in to find his mouth again once they’re pressed flush together. He starts working his way down Rust’s body, pressing his lips near the blue symbol on Rust’s chest and then along the softness of his stomach, hands deftly working all the while.

Rust’s skin quivers and tightens where Marty leaves love bites at his hipbones and the soft inner part of his thighs, and when he feels a finger brush lower to touch that hidden part of him in a silent question, he lets out a soft hiss but cants his hips up into it.

“Come on, Marty,” Rust says, reaching down to grab at him. “All that packing you did, I know you brought something.”

Marty lets out a low huff of laughter, ducking his head away even though he’s got a wicked sort of grin on his face that Rust can see in the firelight. “Hold on,” he says, and slides off the bed to move through the shadows until he comes back again.

Past lives hadn’t allowed or indulged Rust in this sort of attention, and even though the fumble of getting ready tends to make him writhe around in impatience, he gives himself over to it tonight. Marty takes his time, easing him along without hurry, and waits until the muscles in Rust’s thighs are starting to strain before he crooks a finger against the spot that makes him shudder and gasp.

Rust swears and bucks his hips up, clutching at Marty’s shoulders while the other man presses him along again and again. Talented as he’s always been with his mouth and his hands, and Rust knows Marty could undo him just like this, leaving all the rest of him untouched.

“You’ve got to stop that,” Rust says, something he rasps halfway into the pillow while a shudder ripples across his shoulders. “Fuck, Marty—not yet, not yet.”

Rust breathes deep and evenly, already heavy-eyed and impossibly hard, though he almost regrets the moment Marty pulls his hand away and draws himself up to find Rust’s face. They’re both starting to flush over with arousal, noticeable even in the low light, and Marty lets his eyes roam down Rust’s body until he sees the drop of wetness gathered at the tip of his cock.

Marty keeps a steadying palm low on Rust’s stomach but reaches out with the other, giving him a light stroke until his thumb brushes against the damp warmth. A profound sort of thing, touching the pearled sheen of Rust’s desire for him, and the mere thought leaves Marty alight and aflame and overflowing.

He’s halfway dizzy when he leans sideways and finds Rust’s mouth again, nearly falling into him as their hips knock and slot together. “God help me, Rust,” Marty says, watching the other man’s lashes dip shut inside the same moment his lips part open in a quiet gasp. “Make me wanna love you down to nothing.”

Marty lets out a breathless kind of laugh at his own words until Rust looks at him again, dark eyes deep enough to wade into, and then he goes still. They watch one another open and unguarded, held suspended in a beat between seconds, and that’s all the time Marty needs to decide.

“Can I?” he asks, reaching up to push a hand through Rust’s hair, one thumb barely tracing along his temple.  
  
Rust’s answering question is something Marty feels in his belly, earnest and softly spoken, only a low hum between them. “Do what?” he asks, even though Marty thinks he already knows. Rust knew the moment he led Marty to this bed, like an auspice he pulled from nothing but the snowy sky.  
  
Marty’s eyes waver and dip away before coming back to Rust’s face, the moment briefly fluttering like a shy bird between them. He’s held this man’s life inside his body with his bare hands, but that had been an act unspoken. “Love you,” he says, and then decides he has nothing left to be ashamed of. “Make love to you.”  
  
“Christ, Marty,” Rust says a little hoarsely, thinking he’d have laughed outright in anybody’s face had they said those words to him anywhere else in his life, had it been anybody else but Marty. “You know I’d let you do whatever you wanted to me.”

“I’m here asking, though,” Marty says, kissing the next few words somewhere under Rust’s ear, lips lightly grazing down his throat. “Tell me that’s what you want.”

“Yes,” Rust says with what little breath he can muster up, letting the word land against the side of Marty’s face while all the tension melts from his body with the admission of it. “That’s what I want.”

There’s the slow pull of something that feels like a ritual, alignment between the terrain of two bodies, Marty taking himself in hand and letting his body settle into the open cradle of Rust’s hips. The moment they finally fit together is almost like release in itself and Rust holds Marty still and close against him without moving, suspended in the spell of being filled again.

“I love you,” Marty says softly, a smile breaking through his voice, and Rust’s whole body thrums with the endless revelation of it—not love itself, he thinks, but finding this love with Marty.

But then his voice is gone and he can’t tell him, couldn’t say it back right now if he tried, because everything’s raising up like a hot welt in his throat and he squeezes his eyes shut, sucks in a shallow breath scraped raw around the edges and holds on to the thing that brought him this far. The thing he rises for at the break of every morning, the one thing he—against all odds, after everything—took into his hands as his own to keep and hold onto.

The room has bled and blurred into diluted smears of orange and golden shadow, a thousand different shades of the thing he loves, and Rust tries to breathe through the tightness in his chest but Marty still hears the rattle there, finds his face with eyes and gentle fingertips and goes still against him.

“Hey, hey now,” Marty says in a quiet voice, dove-soft and careful, one thumb reaching up to rest somewhere under Rust’s eye and wipe at the dampness there. “What’s wrong?”

_Nothing_ Rust wants to say, because there isn’t anymore, but he can remember a time spent waking up in his bunk behind a bar so many years ago, burning up with sweat and all the licks of phantom fire on his body that felt like they’d known the heat of another person's touch. It hadn’t been real at the time but it rushes back through the sieve of time and memory and here he is now, body thrumming in all the places where his skin meets Marty’s, the two of them locked and wound around one another in a lover’s knot.

Rust has never felt so present in his life, never been swallowed so far down into the certainty of this feeling he’d finally found with Marty. Like Jonah camped in the belly of a great whale, only he’s uncovered a hidden world of unknown wonder here in the circle of another man’s arms.

“I’m here,” Rust tells him when he finds his voice again, hooking an ankle around Marty’s thighs as his hands trace easy over his back. “I’m here, Marty—c’mon.”

Marty pulls back and draws himself up a bit, kneeling there between the open spread of Rust’s thighs, the pale skin there soft and untouched and only ever for him. They move together without a word as Marty gets a hand braced up under Rust’s hips, holding him steady while he slowly starts moving with their pulses thrumming heavy in all the places they touch.

Their eyes lock and hold at the height of the next thrust and Rust gasps softly, hands fisting in the sheets as he tries to wrap his legs back around Marty’s waist. “Marty,” he says, calling him back down with that single word worn smooth around the edges. “Please.”

And Marty follows him because he always does, bowing back over low into Rust’s arms until he feels the other man’s breath warm on his cheek, one heel pressing like a brand into the small of his back. He’s so deep and they’re so close that it’d be a sin to pull out now, and so he just rocks steady, moving his hips until Rust sobs out something that might be his name.

Stripped raw and trembling, Rust reaches a hand down to touch the burning space between him and Marty. He’s lost in this room, unaware of anything and everything but the two of them brought together into one body. Lower and lower, until he finds the place where they’re joined and moving together.  
  
Marty’s hips stutter and jerk when he realizes, lips parting open with a wrecked sound like he’s been held out at arm’s length and shot. “ _Rust_ —” he gasps, body curving like a drawn bow.  
  
“God, Marty, just like that,” Rust says, not caring about the tremor caught in his voice. He wraps his legs around Marty’s hips and pulls him in tighter, feeling a divine kind of heat roll from his chest to his knees. “Just like that.”  
  
Wetness wells at the corners of his eyes and gathers until it falls into his hairline, and Rust thinks he might be crying but not out of any bright pain or sadness, letting the tears come clean and freely while Marty rocks like a gentle current between his hips. He’s buried his face in Rust’s neck and whispers sweet things there that lack volume but not meaning, like time around them has turned to amber and they could stay like this forever.

When Rust comes he feels it break and unravel through his whole body in a low thrum, all the rest blooming across his stomach in hot ribbons of silk. Marty’s hands on him and Marty still inside him, working him over through the trembling bliss of it all, everything around them gone gold and rosy. But Rust holds on and waits, urging Marty along with his legs wrapped around his hips and his mouth at his temple until he finally shudders and lets go.

They breathe against one another for a time, still collapsed in the wake of what they’d found and made. Marty’s weight bearing down on his is one that Rust welcomes, all his soreness and sweat be damned. He traces the pads of his fingers up Marty’s back and over his shoulders, then back down the ridge of his spine to find the dimples in his lower back.

“I remember what you said to me, now,” he says, feeling Marty shift against him. “When I was in the dark.”

Sleepy confusion threads through Marty’s voice when he lifts his head to look. “What was that?” he asks, sliding a broad palm down Rust’s side to the notch of his hip.

“The old woman at the sunflower field knew,” Rust says, and it takes a moment before the memory of that day in the tall flowers even dawns on Marty. “When I was—when I was fading out. And you were there with me.”

That’s one memory Marty knows he couldn’t ever forget, no matter how much time and distance he puts between then and now. “What did I say?” he whispers, almost afraid to hear Rust’s answer.

“You told me we had to get back home,” Rust says, and knows it deep enough that the truth is buried in his bones. His eyes are clear now, earnest and open. “All I had to do was wake up.”

A chill runs through Marty, the two of them still so close that Rust can feel it current through his own body. Marty makes a broken noise, almost too small to hear, and Rust holds him tighter than before.

“I remember,” Marty says, rising up again to press the words against the corner of Rust’s mouth, his voice the only hushed sound while the snow muffles the outside world around them. “I remember.”

They stay together until weariness slowly pulls them apart to clean up, drawn back into the dip in the middle of the bed to face each other.

“Tomorrow’s our last day,” Rust says, watching Marty with clear and sated eyes. “Only have one thing left I need to show you.”

Marty smiles back at him, sleepy but still there. “The stars, huh,” he says, reaching out to touch a little curl of damp hair on Rust’s forehead.

“The stars,” Rust says, taking Marty’s hand and holding it close before he can pull it away again.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


The forest has been shrouded in a blanket of white by daybreak, powdery and soft and nearly perfect as far as snow was ever concerned. Marty peers at the outside scene from where he stands at the windows wearing a pair of sweatpants that might be his or Rust’s, sipping at his first mug of tea for the day. He’d risen before Rust in a rare stroke of luck and shuffled around on bare feet to find a pair of socks and some clothes, adding more wood to the ember fire while he waited for water to boil on the stove.

He hears Rust stirring as he finally wakes, the bedframe creaking as he sits up to hang his legs over the side. He paws around for another pair of long johns at the foot of the bed before walking over to press himself up against Marty’s back, warm hands settling low on his hips.

“Reckon this is their first snow of the year,” Rust says, tipping his head toward the white world through the frosted window. “Usually it only sleets and makes a goddamn mess.”

Marty laughs, bringing his mug up for another sip of tea before passing it into Rust’s hands. “It’d be a crying shame,” he says. “Letting all this pretty snow go to waste while we’re up here.”

“I ain’t going out there and building you a snowman,” Rust says, though he kisses the nape of Marty’s neck before moving across the room to start pulling on more layers over his long johns. “Much as you’d be inclined to think otherwise.”

“What’re you doin’ getting all bundled up for then?” Marty snorts, walking over to pick up his tea where Rust had set it on the dresser. He fiddles with the radio while he’s there and switches it back to life, watching Rust do up his thick blue flannel one button at a time.

“Going out,” Rust says, picking up another shirt and throwing it Marty’s way so it lands across his shoulder after sweeping across his face. “C’mon.”

Their boots leave clean prints on the porch as they step out into early morning, Rust minding Marty’s feet as they thud down the steps and hit virgin ground. It’s as cold as all frozen hell out and heaven knows Rust hasn’t missed the bite of frozen wind on his hands and cheeks, but the look on Marty’s face more than makes up for any of his old resentment for winter.

At least for the most part, until he’s crouched down to study a set of animal prints in the snow when a frozen ball smacks him square in the back. It explodes in a burst of powder that startles him enough to stumble, and when he straightens up and turns around Marty’s only watching him with both hands tucked away in his coat pockets.

“Damn,” Marty says, letting out a low whistle. “That Sasquatch fella sure does move quick.”

“Mmhmm,” Rust answers, narrowing his eyes while he tries a little too hard not to smile. “He does.”

They trudge further out into the woods, everything bright white tinged almost peachy in light of the rising sun. Marty kicks through the snow on sheer principle, almost like a little boy seeing it for the first time, while Rust’s prints are long and spare behind him like a light-footed deer.

“We can head back into town for a little while before catching the highway north,” Rust says, warm breath clouding around him while he talks. “Takes about three hours driving time to get up closer to the circle. Better sky viewing out that way.”

“There a state park up there or something?”

“Not where we’re headed,” Rust says. “Just know of a good spot where it’s quiet and there aren’t too many lights burning.”

They keep walking along through a grove of fir trees, feeling the sun warm along their backs, until Rust points up toward the top of one at a pair of eyes blinking back at them. Marty stops and squints up to find a great horned owl tucked away on a high branch, and as soon as he opens his mouth Rust reaches above his head and yanks the end of a heavy bough, leaving all the snow gathered in the night to tumble down over his head like a burst of frozen flour.

“Jesus Chri— _Rust!_ ” Marty sputters, wiping snow out of his eyes and shaking himself off like a wet dog. He reaches out to grab at Rust but the other man is already loping away toward the cabin, his old crow-rasping laughter trailing along behind him.

  
  
  


Fairbanks is a whole new city under its fresh dusting of snow, though it’s nowhere near as heavily blanketed as it was further up in the mountains. There’s a little pancake and waffle joint next door to place set up with a window display full of old photographs and oddments and a half-scale bust of what looks like an orca carved from wood and inlaid with abalone. Rust and Marty burn through a late-morning breakfast of pancakes and bacon before wandering back out to the storefront, gazing in at the shop’s strange wares.

“You know what we forgot to do?” Marty murmurs after a moment, peering at the black and white photos of cloaked seal hunters and a shipwreck wedged between two icebergs. “Send Shelley that postcard she wanted.”

Rust nods, reaching up to tug a little at the scarlet scarf that has mysteriously wound itself around his neck again. “We’ll get one in the postbox for her before we leave town today,” he says, and then glances up at the shopfront’s name painted along the glass window. “Did you wanna bring anything back for anybody else?”

“Nah, they don’t need any token mugs or keychain shit,” Marty says, starting to stroll further down along the breezeway, and then slows to turn his head when he spots something in another shop window. Rust looks in to find what he sees and immediately knows who and what he’s thinking about.

“Well,” Marty says, smiling a bit sheepishly at Rust before turning to look at the plush baby harbor seal with spotted fur. “I know one little somebody who might need something.”

As it turns out, they find Shelley a variety of postcards and address all three back to Lafayette, Louisiana in Marty’s boxy handwriting. A grizzly bear, a cityscape of Fairbanks proper, and then one that Rust quietly picked out of the mountains splashed like watercolor against the evening skyline.

Miss Delilah’s little purchase gets wrapped up in a paper bag and loads up in the truck with its new guardians, and all three take the long highway north toward the Arctic Circle.

The land is raw and beautiful as it passes by, the road drawing them up through towns called College and then Livengood, where there’s a sign proclaiming that the James Dalton Highway will take you all the way north to the edge of the Arctic sea. Mountains loom and the forest is never-ending, but at times the ramshackle homes and withering townships running alongside the craggy roads tend to make Marty think of his earliest days spent with Rust.

Aluminum and ash and one big fucking ghetto stretching through whatever the hell a psychosphere ever was—but there’s a charm in that, somehow, or maybe a lesson if Marty reflects hard enough. People and places move through time and space but they don’t change much, at least not really, no matter where you go. They were always what they were destined to be from the start.

And here they are, a thousand and one miles away from the slum country of Louisiana, seeing the same things stamped onto existence in a picture he’s looked at countless times before. Marty wonders if the shade of his younger self, still blond-headed and full to the brim with swaggering bluster, could have pulled back the curtain and seen into this future, this now, this reality. Just waiting for time to catch up with him.

The snow grows thicker the further north they go, stretching out pure and white on open plots of land cut in between the wooded sprawl. The space between homesteads grows sparser and not many folks are out enjoying the weather, though they spot a few blanketed draft horses out pawing in their roped-off pasture before they whip their heads up and take off at a gallop across the field.

Rust slows the truck with nobody coming up behind them on the empty highway, and he and Marty watch as a team of sled dogs and a musher come barreling up toward the road at a full run. The dogs are a motley crew of ten, all different colors with their feet dashing through the snow as fast as they’ll carry them. The sled is empty save for its musher bundled up in a bright yellow slicker, and the whole team moves so fast across the land that they almost look like they’re flying.

“Now there’s something I’ve never seen before,” Marty says, smiling as the sled turns to run parallel to where they’re still slowly cruising down the pavement. The musher holds up a hand as the dogs sprint by and then all eleven are racing off, turning to disappear back over the bank they’d first come down.

“Never really done it myself before,” Rust says, picking up speed again while the diesel engine groans on an incline. “Those racing dogs are just about half-wild. Most of ‘em aren’t even considered pets—run like machines through the snow, though.”

Marty huffs a little, peering over at him. “Ain’t you ever had a dog before? Just some old mongrel to hang around with.”

“Nope,” Rust says. “Pop didn’t believe in using them to hunt game, so we had no reason to keep one around. Beyond that I can’t say I ever really thought too hard on it.”

“Would you ever want one?” Marty asks. “I mean, not now, but—later on. Course we got the cat n’ all, but I reckon she could learn to get along.”

Rust glances over at him before looking back ahead at the road. “If you want a dog, Marty, then I don’t see why we can’t get a dog.”

“I suppose I just took you for a cat person all this time,” Marty says with a snort, and then shakes his head. “Nah, we don’t need anymore critters running around. Anything else drops into my life, it ain’t gonna be something I went looking for, so here’s hoping we get surprised with something good.”

“Wonder how much is left out there capable of taking you by surprise,” Rust says quietly, shifting his hands around to the low point in the steering wheel.

“With all the shit we’ve seen?” Marty asks, shifting around to get more comfortable in the passenger seat. They’re sixty-two miles from where Rust had marked the map and the sun is already starting to dip in the sky even though it’s only a hair past midday. “I can’t imagine there’s too much more out there that’ll shock me.”

“Maybe not,” Rust says, reaching up to adjust his sun visor. “Guess we’ll just have to wait and find out.”  
  


  
* * *  
  
  


There’s a place somewhere in the vast wilderness between Fairbanks and the rim of the Arctic Circle, nameless and hidden away down a little dirt path that runs like a tributary through forgotten land left to go wild. There’s nothing of any note out there, not even tire tracks left from the last soul who might’ve come through here two or ten or twenty years ago. The road is mostly buried beneath a thin layer of melting snow and abruptly ends without rhyme or reason, opening up to nothing but a wide open slice of untouched earth.

As far as Rustin Cohle knows, this just might be the best place on the planet to look up and see the stars. He hadn’t found it until he was long past forty years old and wandering through life just enough to get lucky in being lost out here, but that didn’t matter. He’d laid out in the back of his truck under an old blanket and canvas tarp and watched the sky roll and twist and come to life. It’d almost been like a vision, one of those misfired and broken synapses in his head, but he knew otherwise. There’d been a time when he was a boy, before Crash and before everything else, when he’d come close to seeing the same thing.

But this is the place.

He steers off-road just before dark and drives the truck into the pure snow, far out into the middle of an empty field. There are trees scattered here and there, hardy enough to have stood alone or in small clusters, but not much else for what feels like miles. The face of the forest is a distant smudge on the horizon, looming far enough away that it almost looks like a dreamlike painting.

Marty steps down out of the truck and meets Rust at the dropped tailgate, profile shadowed and silhouetted against twilight. He helps pull out some of what they’d brought along—a sack of packed supper and a thermos of coffee, one old flashlight, two lumpy sleeping bags they’d found up in the loft at Fisherman’s Roost and a thick bundle of woven blankets. It’s twelve degrees below freezing and the wind can’t seem to make up its mind about being mild or mean, not to mention they lost cell service in full about an hour ago. But there’s nobody or nothing else in sight and when Rust finally cuts the headlights everything but the horizon goes dark.

They spread out a palette in the bed of the truck, laying down the sleeping bags before clambering up to sit propped against the back window. Watch the sun disappear over sandwiches and the last of the peanut butter crackers Rust won’t ever admit to being his favorite, even back in the days when Marty kept a pack or two in the glovebox of their old work car.

It doesn’t take long before the aurora lights roll in and brighten against their new backdrop of black night, standing out effervescent and eerie where they twist and shimmer across the endless expanse of stars. Rust wordlessly lies back in the bed of the truck, stretching out long with his hands tucked behind his head, and waits until Marty settles down next to him with his brightened eyes still cast toward the moving sky.

“They’ve been there the whole time,” Rust says, watching the emerald and sapphire swirl like marbled ribbons of sheer silk through bursts of pink, and it’s almost dizzying but he can’t look away. “Just easier to see once it gets dark.”

Beyond the borealis are the stars—thousands of them, perhaps millions, scattered like crushed diamond from one end of the velvet sky to the other. Big and small, white-hot and cooler blue. The moon is only a thin splinter in the sky, like a hook gone out fishing in this river of color, and it’s all so close and vibrant that Marty is almost tempted to reach a hand above their heads and touch the closest thing in reach.

“What do you hear?” he whispers, almost shyly, looking over at Rust in the dark. “You used to say—they had a song to them, I guess.”

What Rust tastes and hears when he watches the atmosphere shiver and dance like this isn’t something he could translate into any spoken language, but he tries for Marty. “They strike notes in my head sometimes,” he says, pointing out the Big Dipper where it shines the brightest. “Piano notes, bells, maybe something other than that. It ain’t like any music like I’ve heard before.”

Cassiopeia is visible here, too, though almost too faint to make out in late autumn’s sky. “The Lady in the Chair,” Rust says, pointing out the constellation shaped like a queen’s throne even as his hand trembles a little with the cold. “See her better closer to December.”

“And I can see _you_ shaking like a fuckin’ leaf over there,” Marty says, softer than he might’ve intended, sitting up to shake out one of the quilts they’d brought with them. He throws one heavy side across Rust before tucking himself back down, bundling up under the two blankets they’d already laid out before scooching closer to Rust. “Must be a damn good reason we’re up here freezing our asses off, much as you hate the cold.”

“Course there is,” Rust says, tipping his head to look at Marty. “You hadn’t seen the stars.”

They both look up again at the northern lights, and Rust knows that the science behind all this would talk about electrons colliding through the magnetic field, about bursting solar winds and the earth’s swirling atmosphere, about things that don’t really explain everything beautiful in this world and beyond it. Being cold, he thinks, is but a small price to pay for all this—for everything he’s ever held and lost and found again, for the darkness and the light and for Marty.

He thinks of his daughter, her laughter like silver chimes and bluebells, her tiny hand warm on his neck when she’d lean in to give him a wet toddler kiss. And his father, hardened in body and mind, withdrawn and halfway crazy but still devoted enough to have raised his only son into a man.

“That’s how it goes, you know, with the things you love,” Rust says, eyes filled to the brim with green and blue light, though his thumping heart washes his senses over with gold and honey. “They’ll hurt you or they’ll leave but you—you can’t stay away, at least not forever. You love something enough, you’re always gonna come back around to it in the end.”

Marty stirs a little next to him, clearing his throat against the cold. “You talking about stars, or are you talking about something else?”

“I’m talking about everything, Marty,” Rust says. “I’m talking about forever.” He shifts some under the blanket, searching for something that Marty can’t make out or see in the dark. “And I’ve thought about a lot of shit these past few years, and it seems like I’ve might’ve been wrong about some things I said way back when.”

Marty lets out a small laugh, though it cuts off short when he looks up and sees that Rust is reaching over to set something small on his chest. “What—?” he begins to ask, eyes gone wide in the night.

“So maybe a man can love, after all,” Rust says, voice shaking just a little bit. “Maybe more than he means.”

Marty has gone deadly quiet when he reaches up to touch the thing Rust had left on his chest. He picks it up with numbed fingers and turns it over in his hand before he realizes he’s holding a little velvet box, blue as a tiny robin’s egg.

“Rust,” he says, suddenly gone hoarse but not from the cold. He squeezes the box into the heart of his hand and nearly forgets to breathe.

“Open it, Marty,” Rust says softly. “Please.”

And when Marty does, the first thing that falls out is a curl of silver ribbon, just as fine and pretty as the day he’d tied it in a bow one long Christmas ago. But then there’s a curve of gold, too, tinted a tiny bit blue under the Alaskan sky.

Marty pulls the ring out, weighs it in his hand. Pinches it between two fingers and wonders if it’s real, if holding on too tight might make it wink out of existence. But it’s there when he looks again, and his throat’s gone awfully tight, and he tries to talk a few times before he actually gets around to finding any words.

“You bring me all the way up here just to do that?” he asks Rust at last, blinking fast while he looks at the gold band.

“Not at first,” Rust says around a wavering smile. “I’ve been holding on to it for a while now. Guess I was just looking for the right time to give it to you.”

“Well you picked good, you asshole,” Marty says, not even managing to get the ring all the way on his finger at first because he’s smiling too damn hard and his eyes are burning maybe just a little too much to see. “Always gotta go and outdo me some way or another.”

Rust is grinning now, and when Marty twists under their blankets to plant one on him he wraps his arms around his neck and holds on, the two of them smiling hard enough that the kiss is more teeth and noses crashing together than anything else.

“Let’s see, then,” Rust says, taking Marty’s hand in his and holding it up in front of them. “Pretty sure I got the right one.”

“I’d wear something you got out of a fuckin’ gumball machine at this point,” Marty murmurs, though he fits the ring on his finger and then reaches for Rust’s hand to compare. The bands are identical, just the same, plain gold and perfect.

“Nothin’ snooty,” Rust says, threading his fingers through Marty’s.

“Nothing snooty,” Marty echoes, holding their hands up against the darkness of night, only this time filled with all the world’s color and the brightness of a thousand stars.

 

   


 Fin.


	36. author's note

Lo and behold, we finally made it.   
  
Nearly three years later now, I feel like I might need to revamp my formal dedication statement from way back in the beginning. And so here at the close, I’d like to devote this work first and foremost to my dear friend Allie, who held my hand nearly every step of the way and made this whole damn journey all the more possible. I couldn’t have made it without you, girl, and your love and friendship is as an integral part of this story as anything else that went into it.

And then, of course, I want to offer this work to whoever else found that they needed it when they did. I think you might know who you are.

It would’ve been easy to slap y’all with a “so long and farewell” note at the closing of Chapter 35 and just call it a day, but this story has come to mean so much more to me than that. I hope you can bear with me while I share a few parting words here at the end of the road.

When I started writing this fic in March 2014 in the wake of True Detective’s first season finale, I had no idea where it was going, how long it was going to be or what it would eventually come to represent for myself and other people around the world. Truth be told, at the time I had no idea _why_ I was even really writing it outside the fact that some part of me felt compelled to do so. But things unfolded and kept unfolding until this fic seemed to take on something akin to a life of its own, wherein I was only one small person tackling something that I felt had grown so much larger than me. As soon as you guys started throwing love and support my way, I think it gradually started to become yours, too.

It continues to amaze me, that people have found personal meaning and inspiration from this story about two damaged and flawed old men—that some of you guys have forever tied Rust and Marty to sunflowers and calico cats and sunlight slanting in through the kitchen window, of all things. That despite all my mistakes and radio silence and bizarre plot choices you still stuck around to hear me out, and in light of all that, I just want to thank you for sharing this unique experience with me. For making it meaningful and wholesome and all the more rewarding, and for helping me give it life with your support. You too know who you are, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

As for the boys themselves, Rust and Marty have lived and flourished and bickered in my head every single day since I started this thing on a wing and a prayer so many moons ago. They haven’t been an unwelcome presence by any means, and I’m glad I was able to let them live onward in some sense, to pursue that happier ending I think they deserved after walking out of darkness together. I have been criticized at times for being overly saccharine and sentimental in the depictions seen in this story, and be that what it may, I have loved these boys far too much to ever really hurt them. Considering what they’d already been through, I wanted them to be happy and gentler and safe in the newfound autumn of their shared life—and while that may not have been to everybody’s diverse liking, I hope you can at least understand and appreciate what I was trying to do at the heart and soul of things.

I wanted to let them heal and live _forward_. I wanted this story to be about love and rediscovering tenderness and two people who only grew stronger and closer in the face of things that challenged them. I wanted it to be about the light winning, even for broken people who have been touched by horror time and again.

As the saying goes, you have to write what you want to read—so I did. And then I endeavored to write something that people could find comfort and catharsis in, because that was also what I found myself looking for. So as much as it was healing for Rust and Marty and anybody else, it was just as healing for me, too. I like to joke that I wrote a novel-length fanfic instead of going back to therapy, but there may be more truth to that than I’m willing to admit even now. Without a single doubt I know these characters and their story helped me find my writing voice again after a period of several years where I didn’t put pen to paper, and whomever I am indebted to for that, I suppose I’ll have to buy them a beer or two sometime. But I know many of you have been able to read the invisible ink spilled in this story’s margins at times, and I thank you for being delicate and gracious with anything personal you might’ve found there. Needless to say, What We’ve Got is something held very near and dear to my heart.

Writing has been challenging at times and I’m sorry that it took so damn long to get here. Inside these past two years and nine months I’ve graduated from university, struggled through chronic illness relapses, dealt with depression and anxiety and difficult life changes. I’ve been 21 and 22 and 23 and newly 24, since the last word of this story was written on my birthday just two days ago. I’ve been up, down, and all around—but I’m ultimately grateful that this story and its characters were always a constant, and always something that I could return to when I needed relief or distraction. Strange to think that two middle-aged rednecks could manifest as honest sources of solace in my life, but I’m not in the business of questioning that anymore; it just is what it is, and I’m grateful for it.

So, to everybody who found meaning in these 35 chapters, I’m glad you could partake in this journey with me. To everybody who offered support and guidance and encouragement along the way, thank you for keeping me afloat. For those of you who have been lurking or quiet for all this time, I ask that you finally share your voice with me—not at length if you’re shy about it, but just to let me know that you were here, too. Thank you all for not giving up.

But for now, I’ll go ahead and take my leave. Thank you for reading this far if you have. Any and all questions or comments are most welcome, and I’ll be happy to reply to you here for the foreseeable future if you have anything you’d like to share with me.

Much love,  
  
  
Hannah

 


End file.
